What If the Biggest Risk of AI Is Us?

There's so much talk these days about artificial intelligence causing the extinction of humanity.  Will AI become smarter than we are? Will it take our jobs? Will it make decisions we can’t control? Will it eventually decide it doesn’t need us at all?

Maybe. But lately, I’ve been thinking about AI differently.

What if AI is like fire?  We need fire. It warms us, cooks our food, gives us light. It helped make civilization possible.

It can also burn down your house.

Water keeps us alive. We can't survive without it. Yet too much of it can wipe out entire communities.

The earth feeds us and gives us someplace to stand. Then every once in a while, it reminds us that the ground beneath our feet isn’t nearly as solid as we thought.

None of these things are good or evil.

They are powerful. And power requires respect.

The difference, of course, is that humans didn’t invent fire, water or earth.

We invented AI.

And now we are making it more powerful at breathtaking speed while simultaneously worrying that someday we may not be able to control it. There’s something almost ironically human about that.

We create something extraordinary. Discover what it can do. Race to make it bigger, faster and more powerful. Compete over who can get there first. Then ask:

Could this possibly be dangerous?

We’ve been here before. Nuclear energy can power cities or destroy them. The internet gave us access to virtually all of human knowledge, and gave misinformation access to virtually all of humanity. Scientific discoveries have cured diseases and created weapons.

The problem has rarely been the existence of power.The problem is what human beings decide to do with it.

Which is why I’m beginning to think we may be asking the wrong question

about AI.

Instead of asking whether artificial intelligence will eventually get out of control, perhaps we should be asking whether we will exercise enough self-control to use it wisely.

Will we put boundaries around something simply because we can see that boundaries are necessary…even when there is money to be made by ignoring them?

Will governments cooperate when cooperation is more important than winning?

Will companies occasionally decide that we can isn’t sufficient reason for we should?

And will individuals continue to think, question and exercise judgment rather than gradually handing those responsibilities over to machines because it’s easier?

AI may eventually become more intelligent than we are in ways we can barely imagine. But intelligence was never the only thing required to manage power...

Wisdom matters.

Restraint matters.

Responsibility matters.

Humanity has spent thousands of years learning how to tend the fire. Now we’ve built a new one.

Perhaps AI isn’t really testing the limits of technology.

Perhaps it’s testing the limits of us.