Doom or Bloom
Question 1
What do you think AI means for our future—and why?
AI means abundant intelligence: dramatically cheaper, broadly available cognitive capability embedded across society. That means a tutor for every child, a capable assistant for every worker, better diagnostics and drug discovery, faster science, better software, and expertise reaching people who cannot afford it today. The long productivity slowdown is not destiny. Intelligence is an input into nearly everything, and making that input cheaper should raise living standards on an enormous scale.
The standard response is to treat delay as neutral and progress as the risky choice. That is backwards. Delaying better medicine costs lives. Delaying education keeps children from reaching their potential. Delaying productivity preserves poverty and scarcity. The alternative to building AI is not some pristine, risk-free present; it is continuing to tolerate problems we may finally have tools to solve.
I also reject the automatic leap from increasingly capable software to a machine acquiring human motives and deciding to exterminate humanity. That is a profound category error—anthropomorphism dressed up as analysis. Yes, there will be scams, cyberattacks, surveillance, censorship, and other abuses. Address those actual harms directly. Do not use speculative catastrophe as an excuse to establish licensing regimes that lock out startups, open-source builders, and ordinary people while handing control to governments and a few incumbent corporations.
So the mandate is simple: build. Compete. Drive costs down. Distribute the capability widely. The future should not be a tiny priesthood rationing intelligence; it should be billions of people using it to become more capable.