Maybe artificial intelligence will kill us all in the next few years. Count me dubious, but who knows? We’re certainly doing our best to deserve it. But whether we are doomed or not, the tone and substance of the warnings on that front from Silicon Valley, which have picked up this month, strike me as both familiar and revealing.
In some ways, what we’re seeing now feels like a mirror image of the more flamboyant rhetoric that surrounded DOGE early in Donald Trump’s second term. In that case, some very impressive people, who were clearly highly intelligent and genuinely accomplished in their domain, insisted with great confidence that applying the mindset and the products of that domain to American government would result in dramatic and wonderful transformations. They seemed to understand the federal government as something like a set of information systems that could be made efficient and effective, although exactly how a better command of the digital realm would translate into the change they were promising was never very clear. What was clear was that they thought it would be straightforward once sufficiently intelligent Silicon Valley people and systems got to take on the problem.
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