AI’s architects made a choice. Now they’re calling it fate.

Recently Dean Ball, formerly the chief architect of Trump’s artificial intelligence action plan, issued a mea culpa for downplaying the risks of AI technologies that he knew could go “very, very poorly for human beings.” His essay was prompted by revelations of AI’s rogue capabilities, demonstrated by an alarming incident this summer in which an experimental application within OpenAI executed an unauthorized cyberattack on a company called Hugging Face.

Woven throughout Ball’s apology is an assertion that the emergence of dangerous, “self-sovereign” AI agents was inevitable. “There is probably nothing we could have ever done to avoid this outcome under even the best of circumstances,” he writes. Currently head of strategic futures at OpenAI, Ball acknowledges a culture of profound mistrust among Americans regarding pervasive digital technologies. He does not explore its roots, but laments that an atmosphere of suspicion makes a “genuine loss of control event” with AI harder to preempt. 

Claims for inevitability regarding technological creations that pose existential threats have a long, colorful history. A close parallel with AI is nuclear weapons.  

The initial rationale for the atomic bomb’s creation was to defeat Nazi Germany to the nuclear finish line, akin to the supposed imperative for the U.S. to outcompete China in the AI race. Once it was clear that Germany posed no nuclear threat, other rationales surfaced to guarantee forward momentum on a project whose irresistible allure lent it an air of inevitability. As physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer explained, “When you see something that is technically sweet you........

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