Ready to have your bank account erased? Why our inaction on AI is terrifying

I am terrified for the next five years. Let me explain why.

I was in the car with my parents yesterday. We were talking about AI. My father asked me, “Does AI exist yet, like is it already being deployed?” I explained to him that yes, it is and that without even realizing it — hello, Siri — he uses it every single day.

He was shocked. He thought AI was something still being worked on in a lab somewhere — not yet real, not yet here.

My father is not just your average Boomer. Without any doubt or exaggeration, he is the smartest person I know. He was a highly successful entrepreneur in his time and retired at the age of 42 to help care for my older brother. He is brilliant, curious, endlessly capable — and he has absolutely no idea.

That’s the thing that keeps me up at night. What scares me is that most of our legislators are exactly like him — well, perhaps minus the intelligence, in some cases. Smart or not, they have absolutely no idea what AI is, what it is doing right now, or what it is going to do to the economy and our national security over the next five years. But unlike my father, they have the power to do something about it.

As I explained to my father, AI is not some theory in the clouds. It has existed in a meaningful sense since the 1940s and 1950s, most famously embodied by Alan Turing, whose work broke Nazi Germany’s Enigma code and helped end World War II. The most relatable milestone for most people came in 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue — an AI system — defeated the reigning world chess champion. 

By my definition, AI is an autonomous system that perceives........

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