The AI Arms Race Is Changing Everything

While you’re reading this sentence, artificial intelligence (AI) programs are painting cosmic portraits, responding to emails, preparing tax returns, and recording metal songs. They’re writing pitch decks, debugging code, sketching architectural blueprints, and providing health advice.

Artificial intelligence has already had a pervasive impact on our lives. AIs are used to price medicine and houses, assemble cars, determine what ads we see on social media. But generative AI, a category of system that can be prompted to create wholly novel content, is much newer.

This shift marks the most important technological breakthrough since social media. Generative AI tools have been adopted ravenously in recent months by a curious, astounded public, thanks to programs like ChatGPT, which responds coherently (but not always accurately) to virtually any query, and Dall-E, which allows you to conjure any image you dream up. In January, ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly users, a faster rate of adoption than Instagram or TikTok.

Proponents believe this is just the beginning: that generative AI will reorient the way we work and engage with the world, unlock creativity and scientific discoveries, and allow humanity to achieve previously unimaginable feats. Forecasters at PwC predict that AI could boost the global economy by over $15 trillion by 2030.

But this frantic gold rush could also prove catastrophic. As companies hurry to improve the tech and profit from the boom, research about keeping these tools safe is taking a back seat. In a winner-takes-all battle for power, Big Tech and their venture-capitalist backers risk repeating past mistakes, including social media’s cardinal sin: prioritizing growth over safety. While there are many potentially utopian aspects of these new technologies, even tools designed for good can have unforeseen and devastating consequences. This is the story of how the gold rush began—and what history tells us about what could happen next.

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