From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Thursday, March 30th.

Most of you probably heard the headline story yesterday about AI, artificial intelligence,

and I'm guessing that many of you

were misled by the way some of the headlines framed it. For example, this from the New York Times,

Elon Musk and others call for pause on AI, citing profound risks to society. That's one example.

There was also this headline in The Guardian. Elon Musk joins call

for pause in creation of giant AI digital minds, or this from NBC News. Elon Musk and several

other technologists call for a pause on training of AI systems. And I could go on with similar headlines from Reuters and the Financial Times and other places.

But here's why I think all those headlines may have misled you and tricked your human brain,

your natural rather than artificial intelligence, into having the wrong first reaction to the story.

All those headlines make it sound like the story

is about Elon Musk. And given what you probably think of Elon Musk these days, maybe you rolled

your eyes. The first few people I mentioned the story too, when it was just breaking yesterday,

were like, oh yeah, there go the big tech companies

trying to get everyone else to stop developing new stuff so they can dominate the market.

But I think that's probably the wrong way to look at.

In broader context, more than 1,100 people signed an open letter from a think tank

called the Future of Life Institute, which

studies existential risks to humanity, how's that for a job? The letter calls for the six-month

pause, almost all of the signatories being less well known than Elon Musk, obviously,

including many who have very different politics and less general weirdness

than he does. They want the pause to assess the impact of and develop policies to stay in control of

...