The Mail

Andrew Marantz's appraisal of two Silicon Valley camps that hold conflicting ideas about A.I.'s development--"doomers," who think it may spell disaster, and "effective accelerationists," who believe it will bring unprecedented abundance--offers a fascinating look at the factions that have dominated the recent discourse ("O.K., Doomer," March 18th). But readers should know that these two vocal cliques do not speak for the entire industry. Many in the A.I. and machine-learning worlds are working to advance technological progress safely, and do not suggest (or, for that matter, believe) that A.I. is going to lead society to either utopia or apocalypse. These people include A.I. ethicists, who seek to mitigate harm that A.I. has caused or is poised to inflict. Ethicists focus on concrete technical problems, such as trying to create metrics to better define and evaluate fairness in a broad range of machine-learning tasks.