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For anyone who has been paying attention to the news for the last week or so, with its saturated coverage of the dystopian powers of artificial intelligence, it would be easy to succumb to the conclusion that we are all doomed.

Despite the fact that the coverage has been more heat than light, this take might actually be right. But that is not necessarily because AI will end up wiping out our species. Rather, it is because of something deeper and far more impervious to regulation: human nature itself.

For anyone who has been paying attention to the news for the last week or so, with its saturated coverage of the dystopian powers of artificial intelligence, it would be easy to succumb to the conclusion that we are all doomed.

Despite the fact that the coverage has been more heat than light, this take might actually be right. But that is not necessarily because AI will end up wiping out our species. Rather, it is because of something deeper and far more impervious to regulation: human nature itself.

For years, I have taught courses in public policy in both the United States and China that explore the dark unexpected consequences of human ingenuity, and the pattern is clear. Many of our most consequential breakthroughs—meaning the things that help sustain notions of human progress—bring about vastly more complicated challenges in their wake.

To help establish this picture, I often go back to the dawn of human society, when small bands of roving hunter-gatherers made the conceptual breakthrough that life might be less “nasty, brutish, and short,” to use Thomas Hobbes’s famous formula, if they instead selected good locations to settle down. The first of these are often thought to have been in the Tigris and Euphrates valley, as well as other river deltas, where predictable seasonal flooding and silt-laden soils favored the emergence of agriculture.

Undoubtedly, this achievement was one of the greatest milestones in the human story. Over time, the food supply........

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