This isn't a particularly partisan issue. I think there's a tendency to catastrophize

different technology areas as opposed to different potential outcomes. My colleagues typically don't think of an investment

in the National Science Foundation as a national security investment, but it is. I think what

you may have characterized in the past is fantastical

some fantastical doomsday scenarios and there are a lot of those and there may

even be a couple that are real and we need to hedge against.

Depending on who you ask, conversations around AI

range from solving the world's toughest problems

to triggering an irreversible apocalypse. We're going to rapidly compress the treatment and drug development time-line.

We will come up with drought-resistant climate change resistant

crumbs to help feed the world.

Do you think that P-Doom or P-Doom is a probability that always humanity has a catastrophic

event?

Do you think it's greater with or without AI?

But these very fears and fantasies go back as far as 1863 when English writer

Samuel Butler, inspired by Darwin, wrote a newspaper article suggesting that humans

would create their own successors, a quote,

self-regulating, self-acting power that would make us the inferior race.

And who could forget the murderous Hal 9,000 in Stanley Kubrick's 2001,

a Space Odyssey, or the dystopian crime prediction

tech in Minority Report, or even Pixar's starry-eyed robot,

Wally, all of which have shaped our relationship with the kind of science fiction that now in some way is becoming science reality.

...