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…