Pay More Attention to A.I.; The New York Times, January 31, 2026

ROSS DOUTHAT , The New York Times; Pay More Attention to A.I.

"Unfortunately everyone I talk with offers conflicting reports. There are the people who envision A.I. as a revolutionary technology, but ultimately merely akin to the internet in its effects — the equivalent, let’s say, of someone telling you that the Indies are a collection of interesting islands, like the Canaries or the Azores, just bigger and potentially more profitable.

Then there are the people who talk about A.I. as an epoch-making, Industrial Revolution-level shift — which would be the equivalent of someone in 1500 promising that entire continents waited beyond the initial Caribbean island chain, and that not only fortunes but empires and superpowers would eventually rise and fall based on initial patterns of exploration and settlement and conquest.

And then, finally, there are the people with truly utopian and apocalyptic perspectives — the Singularitarians, the A.I. doomers, the people who expect us to merge with our machines or be destroyed by them. Think of them as the equivalent of Ponce de Leon seeking the Fountain of Youth, envisioning the New World as a territory where history fundamentally ruptures and the merely human age is left behind."

A Harris Presidency Is the Only Way to Stay Ahead of A.I.; The New York Times, October 29, 2024

 THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, The New York Times; A Harris Presidency Is the Only Way to Stay Ahead of A.I.

"Kamala Harris, given her background in law enforcement, connections to Silicon Valley and the work she has already done on A.I. in the past four years, is up to this challenge, which is a key reason she has my endorsement for the presidency...

I am writing a book that partly deals with this subject and have benefited from my tutorials with Craig Mundie, the former chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft who still advises the company. He is soon coming out with a book of his own related to the longer-term issues and opportunities of A.G.I., written with Eric Schmidt, the former Google C.E.O., and Henry Kissinger, who died last year and worked on the book right up to the end of his life.

It is titled “Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit.” The book invokes the Bible’s description of the origin of humanity because the authors believe that our A.I. moment is an equally fundamental turning point for our species.

I agree. We have become Godlike as a species in two ways: We are the first generation to intentionally create a computer with more intelligence than God endowed us with. And we are the first generation to unintentionally change the climate with our own hands.

The problem is we have become Godlike without any agreement among us on the Ten Commandments — on a shared value system that should guide the use of our newfound powers. We need to fix that fast. And no one is better positioned to lead that challenge than the next U.S. president, for several reasons."