MARK HALPERIN: Social media damaged a generation. Are we about to let AI do the same?

Imagine: two hundred aliens land on Earth, with thousands and thousands more of them expected in looming, unstoppable waves.

And imagine, too, that we know some of the aliens are here to help us, to make our planet better, smarter, and more efficient. But we also know that some of the aliens are here to do us harm, perhaps injure us irreparably. What we dont know is this: which aliens will be good to us, and which will be malevolent?

That is the situation with AI.

But it is more complicated than that.

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Because the good aliens and the bad aliens arent necessarily different aliens. The same technology that can help discover a cure for cancer, give a low-income kid access to a world-class tutor, make government more efficient, and produce extraordinary new wealth also can deceive, manipulate, displace, addict, and destroy. The alien who comes bearing gifts in the morning might be the one who burns down the village at night.

And yet for the multitudes of op-eds and think pieces, the anxious parent text chains and furtive bot-synthesized office memos, the accelerating quotidian reliance on AI for driving directions, recipes, fun facts, and how-tos, we arent discussing AI with the frequency and intensity it warrants.

We are merely watching, transfixed and paralyzed; or turning away and scurrying back to landlines and paperback books; or playing along, sinking into the lazy comfort of an easy answer. An algorithmic echo of Ray Bradburys 1948 short story, "Mars is Heaven."

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There is little doubt that AI will be the next leap forward in human advancement, akin to the printing press, the Industrial Revolution, penicillin, and the internet. But we are not having the urgent, necessary conversations about what it all means.

China, meanwhile, is all in on AI, investigating its most sinister uses, learning its gifts and powers, leveraging it, weaponizing it. In the United States, however, the topic of AI veers shambolically from flippant Matrix memes to end-of-days-style apocalyptic panic, to tepid comparisons with old-school Google.

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The implications of AI are so vast, so incomprehensible, that it is unclear which entities are equipped to wrangle it, or at least enforce some regulations, whether it is the White House or Congress, the two branches united, or state-by-state legislation. Additionally, AI is changing so quickly, and government moves so slowly, that by the time any measures are passed, the technology that prompted the hearings might be several generations old.

One can look at the rise of social media to see a clear, cautionary analogy.

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