Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast.

This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show

is Michael Totten. He's a contributing editor of City Journal, a former foreign correspondent. His

writing has appeared in the Atlantic, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and many other publications

in addition to City Journal. He's the author of novels and nonfiction books,

including dispatches, stories from war zones, police states, and other hellholes. Today, though,

we're going to discuss his recent essay for City Journal, something like fire, which appears in our

winter edition, and it examines the potential and dangers of artificial

intelligence in a kind of wide-ranging, reported look at this new technology. So Michael,

thanks very much for joining it. Thanks, Brian. As you note in the essay, and as I think is increasingly

widely understood, artificial intelligence

is really like nothing human beings have ever created.

The release of Chat GPT back in November 2022, that enabled the public to experience AI's

capabilities, or at least some of those capabilities firsthand.

It certainly led to a lot of

concern and enthusiasm and spurred the beginning of a debate about its role in our future. As you

describe in this essay, some believe that the development of this technology, AI advancement,

will lead to new abundance, new leisure for people. Others,

though, fear that it's going to be a kind of destruction of life. It could even lead to

our extinction so that it's an existential threat. So I wonder, you know, you describe these

two camps as, or dubbed them the optimists and the domers. I wonder if you know, you describe these two camps as, or dubbed them the optimists

...