AI is capable of remarkable feats. And has the power to kill. Meet one woman warning about the dangers ahead

The birth of ‘gunpowder warfare’ can be traced back to the 15th century and the invention of the matchlock gun, the first mechanical firing device. Now drone swarms attack across borders with impunity. In 1685, Giovanni Borelli, the Italian physicist, foresaw a world where machines driven by pulleys could ape the actions of animals. Elon Musk now talks of robots intelligent enough to do the shopping and take the place of surgeons.

Technological development is both immediate and anchored in history, both Everything, Everywhere All at Once and Slow Horses. The fast/slow contrast is embedded in the artwork, Calculating Empires, a 24-meter-long mural, on display at the Design Museum in Barcelona. It visualizes the journey from the printing press to deep fakes, from quipu, an ancient Peruvian calculator made of knotted ropes, to ‘planetary scale’ data systems.

“What I find really interesting is, when people go into this installation, it helps you put this moment in perspective,” Kate Crawford told the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March. Crawford, artificial intelligence research professor at the University of Southern California, is the co-creator of the mural, which took four years to fabricate. With the visual artist, Vladen Joler, the work urges us all to consider who is making the rules and deciding what matters when it comes to fundamental technology shifts. 

“People feel like we’re living in this technological presentism and crazy amount of change,” Crawford said. “So, the ability to step back and say, ‘what have we learned over 500 years?’ [matters]. For me, [the mural] was a transformative project, because what was very clear is that history is not just about technical innovation. It’s about who has the power to set the rules that we will be living within.” 

“This is why agentic AI is so important right now, because it’s a rapidly evolving field. The standards are not yet set, and it’s........

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