Opinion

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has called for "a bill of rights" to protect Americans in what is becoming "an AI-powered world." The concerns about AI are well-known and well-founded: that it will violate privacy and compromise transparency, and that biased input data will yield biased outcomes, including in fields essential to individual and societal flourishing such as medicine, law enforcement, hiring and loans. But AI will compel even more fundamental change: It will challenge the primacy of human reason. For all of history, humans have sought to understand reality and our role in it. Since the Enlightenment, we have considered our reason--our ability to investigate, understand and elaborate--our primary means of explaining the world, and by explaining it, contributing to it.