My conversation with Cal Fussman on “Big Questions” began with one of the most unsettling questions of the AI era. Since then, warnings from inside the frontier labs have only intensified. That makes the question even more urgent: If AI is accelerating faster than our ability to understand it, what is our role in shaping what comes next? There was a moment last year that shook me. I was watching Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, talking…
Fear is rising, Trust is falling, and the AI industry has no one to blame but itself…and what to do about it
Fear is rising. Trust is falling. And the AI industry has no one to blame but itself. For the last two years, the loudest voices in AI have sold the future through a mix of inevitability, disruption, and dread: AGI is near, jobs are going away, the economy may collapse, and somehow this is all supposed to inspire confidence. It doesn’t. It creates narrative debt. And now that debt is coming due, especially among the very people who are supposed…