Among the many unique experiences of reporting on A.I. is this: In a young industry flooded with hype and money, person after person tells me that they are desperate to be regulated, even if it slows them down. In fact, especially if it slows them down. What they tell me is obvious to anyone watching. Competition is forcing them to go too fast and cut too many corners. This technology is too important to be left to a race between Microsoft, Google, Meta and a few other firms.

In October, the White House released a 70-plus-page document called the "Blueprint for an A.I. Bill of Rights." The document's ambition was sweeping. It called for the right for individuals to "opt out" from automated systems in favor of human ones, the right to a clear explanation as to why a given A.I. system made the decision it did, and the right for the public to give input on how A.I. systems are developed and deployed. But if it did become law, it would transform how A.I. systems would need to be devised. And, for that reason, it raises an important set of questions: What does a public vision for A.I. actually look like?

Imagine a world where autonomous weapons roam the streets, decisions about your life are made by AI systems that perpetuate societal biases and hackers use AI to launch devastating cyberattacks. This dystopian future may sound like science fiction, but the truth is that without proper regulations for the development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it could become a reality. The rapid advancements in AI technology have made it clear that the time to act is now to ensure that AI is used in ways that are safe, ethical and beneficial for society. Failure to do so could lead to a future where the risks of AI far outweigh its benefits. I didn't write the above paragraph.

A mountain man buys his first chain saw. He comes back to the store a week later complaining that it cuts down only two trees a day when he was told it would cut down 20. The service person says, "Well, let's see what the trouble is," and starts it up. The mountain man jumps back and asks, "What's that noise?" (He'd been sawing without the engine on.) I feel like that mountain man when it comes to ChatGPT, the powerful new artificial intelligence chatbot that seemingly everyone is experimenting with.

ChatGPT makes an irresistible first impression. It's got a devastating sense of humor, a stunning capacity for dead-on mimicry, and it can rhyme like nobody's business. Then there is its overwhelming reasonableness. When ChatGPT fails the Turing test, it's usually because it refuses to offer its own opinion on just about anything. When was the last time real people on the internet declined to tell you what they really think?

Plato mourned the invention of the alphabet, worried that the use of text would threaten traditional memory-based arts of rhetoric. In his "Dialogues," arguing through the voice of Thamus, the Egyptian king of the gods, Plato claimed the use of this more modern technology would create "forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories," that it would impart "not truth but only the semblance of truth" and that those who adopt it would "appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing," with "the show of wisdom without the reality." If Plato were alive today, would he say similar things about ChatGPT? ChatGPT, a conversational artificial intelligence program released recently by OpenAI, isn't just another entry in the artificial intelligence hype cycle. It's a significant advancement that can produce articles in response to open-ended questions that are comparable to good high school essays.

Humans are an incredibly adaptable species. With the advent of livestock and domestic pets, for example, we invented new symbiotic relations that went on to define our civilization. Artificial intelligence as it exists today is already radically changing our economy, with computers usurping traditionally human professions and humans mobilizing to maintain them. If computers eventually become sentient, we will probably be quick to become more dependent on smart technology as a tool--and also to share a transactional relation with AI, akin to what we have with horses and dogs. Hollywood would have you believe that AI is an existential threat to civilization.

The question has arisen with escalating frequency in recent years, a sort of journalistic thought bubble emerging from the collective consciousness of writers. Will artificial intelligence (AI) save humanity, or supplant us? On the one hand, we are told that AI holds the potential to solve some of the world's biggest problems -- challenges like poverty, food insecurity, inequality and climate change. On the other hand, some very smart people have issued warnings. Stephen Hawking said the technology could "spell the end of the human race."

Examples abound: Authorities in India exploit facial recognition technology to locate protesters, as well as to sweep and search poor neighborhoods largely populated by migrants; Pakistan bought an $18.5 million system to keep an eye on online traffic; in Serbia, officials hope to "cover every significant street and passageway" of Belgrade with monitoring equipment. The evidence so far doesn't prove that these tools even do their job of stopping crime, but they certainly make it easier to crack down on dissent. Many of the systems the countries rely on come, at low cost, from China -- in whose massive infrastructure project, known as the Belt and Road initiative, 55 of the 67 swing states included in the report participate.

A theme of the hearing was the work that the government is doing to "destigmatize" the reporting of these sightings. That is to say: There are many, many more sightings than we know about, in part because you seem like a nut if you talk too loudly about what you saw. So the sightings that we can investigate are a small fraction of the total sightings (something I am made very aware of whenever I mention this topic, and my inbox fills with U.F.O. I wouldn't say, watching the testimony, that the takeaway was that we've been visited by aliens. Perhaps this will all, eventually, resolve into optical illusions and malfunctioning sensors.