#Nyt opinion page series

The other leading AI lab, DeepMind, has no plan at all.Īn aside: None of this danger depends on whether or not AIs are or can be conscious it’s intrinsic to the notion of powerful cognitive systems that optimize hard and calculate outputs that meet sufficiently complicated outcome criteria.

Just hearing that this is the plan ought to be enough to get any sensible person to panic. OpenAI’s openly declared intention is to make some future AI do our AI alignment homework. There’s no proposed plan for how we could do any such thing and survive. If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing. A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers-in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Valid metaphors include “a 10-year-old trying to play chess against Stockfish 15”, “the 11th century trying to fight the 21st century,” and “ Australopithecus trying to fight Homo sapiens“. The likely result of humanity facing down an opposed superhuman intelligence is a total loss. That kind of caring is something that could in principle be imbued into an AI but we are not ready and do not currently know how.Ībsent that caring, we get “the AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, and you are made of atoms it can use for something else.” She has a graduate degree from the Columbia Journalism School, where she was awarded the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship.Without that precision and preparation, the most likely outcome is AI that does not do what we want, and does not care for us nor for sentient life in general.

Kingsbury has also worked as a New York-based staff writer and Hong Kong-based foreign correspondent for Time Magazine.Īfter growing up in Portland, Ore., Kingsbury studied as an undergraduate at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. In this role, she was a deputy managing editor for the Globe and the deputy editorial page editor. Kingsbury joined the Globe’s editorial board in 2013 and later edited the Sunday Ideas section. She also edited the Globe’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning commentary on race and education. The same 8-part series, called “Service Not Included,” received the Scripps-Howard Foundation’s 2014 Walker Stone Award for Editorial Writing and the Burl Osborne Award for Editorial Leadership from the American Society of News Editors.

#Nyt opinion page series

While at The Globe, Kingsbury was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished editorial writing for a series on low wages and the mistreatment of workers in the restaurant industries. For The Times, Kingsbury was a 2018 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a series on guns and domestic violence, and she oversaw the paper’s Pulitzer-winning editorials on race and culture in 2019.īefore joining The Times, Kingsbury worked for the Boston Globe where she last served as Managing Editor, with a focus on the digital report, in its newsroom. She first joined The Times in 2017 as Deputy Editorial Page editor.Īs head of Opinion, she oversees the editorial board, guest essays, Opinion columnists, letters to the editor, as well as Opinion’s newsletters, audio, video, graphics, design and digital distribution teams.

Kathleen Kingsbury leads the Opinion report for the New York Times.