Free Republic

In 1997, IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeated the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov. In 2023, ChatGPT passed the bar exam. And last year, Google DeepMind clinched gold at the International Math Olympiad.These milestones are only expected to accelerate, with some business leaders, including SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, predicting artificial general intelligence—AI that is able to meet or surpass human intelligence—could arrive as early as this year. While avid sci-fi fans and business leaders are thrilled by the technology’s potential, others caution about the economic downsides.Salman Khan, the CEO of Khan Academy and vision steward at TED—two organizations that provide...

Think back to February 2020. If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren't paying close attention. The stock market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were going to restaurants and shaking hands and planning trips. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they'd been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed. Your office closed, your kids came home, and...