I've decided to step back from the OpenAI board due to the potential for conflicts of interest with my role as an investor with Greylock. I remain an ally to OpenAI and its mission of beneficial AI for humanity. AI, like most transformative technologies, grows gradually, then arrives suddenly. Headlines make AI feel abrupt and singular when it's compared to a tidal… 35 comments on LinkedIn

Two of the most widely quoted and shared poems in the closing years of this decade were William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming" ("Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold"), and W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939" ("Waves of anger and fear / Circulate over the bright / And darkened lands of the earth"). Yeats's poem, written just after World War I, spoke of a time when "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." Auden's poem, written in the wake of Germany's invasion of Poland, described a world lying "in stupor," as democracy is threatened and "the enlightenment driven away." Apocalypse is not yet upon our world as the 2010s draw to an end, but there are portents of disorder. The hopes nourished during the opening years of the decade -- hopes that America was on a progressive path toward growing equality and freedom, hopes that technology held answers to some of our most pressing problems -- have given way, with what feels like head-swiveling speed, to a dark and divisive new era.

The S&P 500 is up 21% since Election Day. Henry Kaufman, 90, the renowned economist, former managing director at Wall Street firm Salomon Brothers and author of Tectonic Shifts In Financial Markets, shared his views with USA TODAY on the future of the American worker, tax cuts and the middle class, the retirement savings crisis and the risks facing computer-driven markets. Kaufman is president of Henry Kaufman & Company, an economic and financial consulting firm established in 1988. USA TODAY: Robots are invading the workplace. Is technology a threat to middle-class workers? KAUFMAN: The greatest challenge that workers face and we as a society face is that labor over a longer period of time will become more and more obsolete.