Ben Smith

Editor-in-Chief

Last Christmas, an Australian tech entrepreneur saved his pet pit bull Rosie by using ChatGPT and Alphafold to suggest a bespoke cancer vaccine. The story captured global attention because it seemed to capture the dual promise of our technological moment. One is the potential of artificial intelligence to revolutionize personalization, not just advertising or software products, but real-world innovations from lifesaving medicine to tailored educational platforms. The other is a new era of brilliant generalists, in which AI allows creative entrepreneurs and researchers to reach across technical domains for new inventions. 

Are we wrong to be impatient with the AI revolution? Accelerationists say we’re paying a cost in human life and thriving every day we don’t, for instance, roll super-safe self-driving cars out into city streets. But historians say AI breakthroughs are following a familiar pattern in which there’s a longer gap than inventors expect between a breakthrough and its diffusion through a complex economy. Leaders in business and government can help by clearing the regulatory paths to improvement, and by persuading citizens they can trust the new technology, and avoid the sort of backlash that has crippled an American industry on the cusp of an mRNA revolution. In the meantime, however, desperation remains the mother of invention, from the sweet case of the Australian dog lover to the dead-serious breakthroughs in autonomous warfare occurring weekly low in the skies over Ukraine.