Pay more attention to Artificial Intelligence

It took centuries for the consequences of opening the New World to become clear. By contrast, AI is arriving at breakneck speed. And just as choices made after Columbus reshaped history for better and worse, decisions about AI today may reverberate far into the future

- ROSS DOUTHAT

ON A RECENT snowbound day I took up "Conquistadores," Fernando Cervantes's history of the European arrival in the New World, and found myself meditating on the period in the early 1500s when the Americas had been discovered by Europeans but nobody in the European world quite understood what that discovery meant. In that moment, all kinds of possibilities lay open, from the moderate to the eschatological. The "Indies" reached by Christopher Columbus might represent a self-contained archipelago, the promised gateway to India and China, a heretofore unknown continent or a realm of myth and supernatural power.

Spain might have gained a modest commercial and geopolitical edge, found a path to superpower status or set in motion a prophesied sequence of events that would reunite Christendom, defeat the Muslim enemy and hasten Jesus Christ's return.

Explorers pushing further might expect to find primitive tribes or Chinese fleets, dragons and dog-headed men and Prester John, or lost Atlantis and the Fountain of Youth. And if you lived in Europe, your only way to assess all of these possibilities was through dispatches from adventurers with every incentive to hype the golden possibilities, the better to subsidise their journeys into terra incognita. This feels like roughlywhere we stand with artificial intelligence today.