The Tech Investment We Should Make Now to Avoid A.I. Disaster

There's good reason to fear that A.I. systems like ChatGPT and GPT4 will harm democracy. Public debate may be overwhelmed by industrial quantities of autogenerated argument. People might fall down political rabbit holes, taken in by superficially convincing bullshit, or obsessed by folies à deux relationships with machine personalities that don't really exist. These risks may be the fallout of a world where businesses deploy poorly tested A.I. systems in a battle for market share, each hoping to establish a monopoly. A.I. could advance the public good, not private profit, and bolster democracy instead of undermining it.