Can an A.I. Company Ever Be Good?

Mr. Ford is an essayist and a technologist.

Artificial intelligence can be wondrous, but the technology underneath is more than a little monstrous. It eats up all the words in the world, from blogs to books, often without permission. It burns whole forests’ worth of energy, digesting that raw material into its models, and gulps billions of gallons of water to cool down. These are the same qualities we perceive in Godzilla, but distributed. Is it any wonder that the Japanese word “kaiju,” or strange beast, has “AI” smack in the middle?

Mere greed didn’t get us here. In fact, ethics did. The big A.I. labs’ starry-eyed founders believed that the only way to stop the looming threat of a superintelligence........

© The New York Times