The longtime tech journalist says she's seen Silicon Valley make the same mistakes again and again. As the AI industry likes to tell it, superintelligent bots could one day cure cancer and end poverty. Or in the worst-case scenario, they might wipe out all humans from the face of the Earth. In recent weeks, Silicon Valley's existential concerns about the technology it is racing to build have blown up. The tech journalist Kara Swisher sees it differently. "We have to stop thinking AI is going to kill humanity," she told executive editor Adrienne LaFrance at The Atlantic Festival. If the AI future goes sideways, bots won't be to blame. "These are people at the helm of these things." In the several decades that Swisher has covered Silicon Valley--formerly as a reporter at, now as the host of two podcasts--she says that she's seen tech whizzes make the same mistakes again and again: failing to take proper precautions against the products they are building. "One of the things about tech people is they're the smartest people in the world, in case you need to know, because they like to tell you," she said. In her interview with LaFrance, Swisher also discussed the economic implications of the AI race, who is likely to win, and how Americans can respond to this dizzying and worrying AI moment. You have been paying attention to the tech world and AI for basically ever. And now it seems like within the past, say, two weeks, the rest of the world is suddenly paying much closer attention. So I wanted to start just by talking about where you think we are, in this moment.

Over the past few months, many have attempted to translate the uncanniness of Gov. Ron DeSantis' smile into words. After the Republican debates, it's been called "painfully weird" and said to look "like it's on his face upside down." It resembles "a Disney World animatronic" or "an A.I. trying to learn human emotions." It even inspired The Daily Show to put out a public service announcement about "Frownington's Disease," a made-up condition that causes a person's smile to resemble a wince one would make upon "sitting on his own testicles." As nice as it is that one expression has inspired such rich verbiage and creativity--Ron DeSantis, unlikely muse!--you might find yourself longing for a more technical explanation.

Earlier this year, the technology company OpenAI released a program called DALL-E 2, which uses artificial intelligence to transform text into visual art. People enter prompts ("plasticine nerd working on a 1980s computer") and the software returns images that showcase humanlike vision and execution, veer into the bizarre, and might even tease creativity. The results were good enough for Cosmopolitan, which published the first-ever AI-generated magazine cover in June--an image of an astronaut swaggering over the surface of Mars--and they were good enough for the Colorado State Fair, which awarded an AI artwork first place in a fine-art competition. OpenAI gave more and more people access to its program, and those who remained locked out turned to alternatives like Craiyon and Midjourney. Soon, AI artwork seemed to be everywhere, and people started to worry about its impacts. Trained on hundreds of millions of image-text pairs, these programs' technical details are opaque to the general public--more black boxes in a tech ecosystem that's full of them.

For years now, artificial intelligence has been hailed as both a savior and a destroyer. The technology really can make our lives easier, letting us summon our phones with a "Hey, Siri" and (more importantly) assisting doctors on the operating table. But as any science-fiction reader knows, AI is not an unmitigated good: It can be prone to the same racial biases as humans are, and, as is the case with self-driving cars, it can be forced to make murky split-second decisions that determine who lives and who dies. Like it or not, AI is only going to become an even more omnipresent force: We're in a "watershed moment" for the technology, says Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO. Schmidt is a longtime fixture in a tech industry that seems to constantly be in a state of upheaval. He was the first software manager at Sun Microsystems, in the 1980s, and the CEO of the former software giant Novell in the '90s. He joined Google as CEO in 2001, then was the company's executive chairman from 2011 until 2017. Since leaving Google, Schmidt has made AI his focus: In 2018, he wrote in The Atlantic about the need to prepare for the AI boom, along with his co-authors Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, and the MIT dean Daniel Huttenlocher. The trio have followed up that story with The Age of AI, a book about how AI will transform how we experience the world, coming out in November.