In this Broadside, Glenn Harlan Reynolds explores how AI need only take advantage of innate human characteristics – exactly as we programmed it to do – to wreak havoc on society as the most subtle of overlords: anticipating our needs, pleasuring us with tailored “sex bots,” isolating us through convenience, and ultimately thinking for us. Eventually, we may not be able to do – nor even imagine doing – anything without AI. To avoid this trap, we must understand what AI is doing to us, even as it does things for us.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, is the founder of the InstaPundit blog, a former columnist for Popular Mechanics, and the author of An Army of Davids, The New School: How Technology Will Save Education from Itself, and The Social Media Upheaval.