At this weekend’s national conference of LGBTQ+ journalists, I attended a panel about the future of artificial intelligence. The contributors’ takes were uniformly fascinating … and uniformly dire.debut column is a welcome antidote
to the prevailing pessimism about AI. Josh, who is joining us for a year exclusively to cover the industry, begins where most people begin the conversation about AI, which is, ironically, the end: disinformation, disaster, destruction. “Who,” he asks, “starts with extinction?” Of course, Josh says, these threats are worth keeping an eye on, whether they’re near-certainties or very far-fetched. But there’s a better story to be told — one that’s less hysterical, more optimistic, still clear-eyed.You don’t need to be a utopian to get excited about AI’s capacity to fight climate change, cure disease or revolutionize work. This tech is powerful stuff.
We have a flame, a “lump of clay,” as he says, and now we have the grand privilege of figuring out what to do with it.