AI is evolving for its own benefit, not ours

WE HUMANS are in trouble. We have let loose a new evolutionary process that we don’t understand and can’t control.

The latest leaps forward in artificial intelligence, with its large language models and deepfakes, are rightly causing anxiety. Yet people are responding as though AI is just one more scary new technology, like electricity or cars once were. We invented it, the argument goes, so we should be able to regulate and manage it for our own benefit. Not so. I believe that this situation is new, serious and potentially dangerous.

My thinking starts from the premise that all design…