Is AI the Most Important Thing Ever Created?

Kevin Roose says AI is probably the most important thing ever created, though fire is up there too. He went in pretty skeptical that AI would be categorically different from other tools and thought of AI as normal technology. He changed his mind.

Talking with the people building it shifted him. He sees no real technical reason they cannot build something smarter than humans, and a system like that would be incredibly transformative. Humans have never been the second smartest species on the planet, and no one knows how that would go. Steam engines did not go rogue, hack competitors, or develop bioweapons the engineers never expected. As a journalist trying to get the story down, he gets frustrated when people call the work hype or marketing. Something that could not do basic math three years ago is now solving Millennium Prize problems. The shrug feels like the beginning of COVID, when 40 cases in Seattle sounded like no big deal.

The belief fueling the drive is that AI is the most important technology humanity has ever conceived and built, and whoever gets it will be the most powerful entity in the world. An argument about next quarter's revenue would not matter the same way. To the builders, the stakes are existentially important.