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The technologies referred to as "artificial intelligence" or "AI" are more momentous than most people realize. Their impact will be at least equal to, and may well exceed, that of electricity, the computer, and the internet. What's more, their impact will be massive and rapid, faster than what the internet has wrought in the past thirty years. Much of it will be wondrous, giving sight to the blind and enabling self-driving vehicles, for example, but AI-engendered technology may also devastate job rolls, enable an all-encompassing surveillance state, and provoke social upheavals yet unforeseen. The time we have to understand this fast-moving technology and establish principles for its governance is very short.
The term "AI" was coined by a computer scientist in 1956. At its simplest, AI refers to techniques that combine data and algorithms to produce a result. Those techniques can be as simple as Google Maps digesting traffic data to provide the fastest route, Amazon's Alexa "understanding" the question "What time is it?," and your iPhone "recognizing" your face as the ultimate password.
On the cutting edge of AI are applications such as Waymo's self-driving taxis, now in operation in Phoenix. Waymo's onboard computer system orchestrates up-to-the-second data from twenty-nine cameras as well as radar and LIDAR sensors to make potentially life-and-death decisions, not to mention keeping the vehicle headed to its destination. In October, Apple announced that its new iPhone 12 can "look" at a scene through its onboard camera and describe what it "sees" in natural language-as in, "This is a room with a sofa and two chairs."
Examples of unexpected, remarkable AI breakthroughs surface at least monthly. In December, the U.S. Air Force announced its first successful U-2 flight with an AI-based copilot, a development that has far-reaching implications for the future of air combat. In November, Google's DeepMind AI project stunned the medical world with AlphaFold, an AI-based tool that provides much faster ways to predict folds in protein structures, a key element in vaccine research.
The foundation for many if not all of these breakthroughs is a type of AI called "deep learning" or "neural networks," which Geoffrey Hinton, a research scientist at Google, worked out in the mid-2ooos. Enabled by extremely powerful computer processors and virtually unlimited cloud...