Of God and Machines

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Miracles can be perplexing at first, and artificial intelligence is a very new miracle. "We're creating God," the former Google Chief Business Officer Mo Gawdat recently told an interviewer. "We're summoning the demon," Elon Musk said a few years ago, in a talk at MIT. In Silicon Valley, good and evil can look much alike, but on the matter of artificial intelligence, the distinction hardly matters. Either way, an encounter with the superhuman is at hand.