There are many reasons I was deeply disappointed that The Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, chose to kill his newspaper’s editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for president, but none more than the fact that Bezos loves science. And this election coincides with one of the greatest scientific turning points in human history: the birth of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., which is likely to emerge in the next four years and will require our next president to pull together a global coalition to productively, safely and compatibly govern computers that will soon have minds of their own superior to our own.
Donald Trump — who neglected to even appoint a science adviser until over 18 months into his presidency — is intellectually and temperamentally unsuited to assemble any such global alliance. His administration hastened a vaccine for Covid-19 with one hand and then fostered doubt about using it with the other when it met with a conservative anti-vaccine backlash.
Today, Trump’s first priority is not capitalizing on the tremendous opportunities that will come from America leading in the use of A.G.I. nor building a global coalition to govern it, but to impose higher tariffs on our allies to block their exports of cars and toys and other goods to the United States. The only technology Trump seems to be deeply interested in is Truth Social, his own version of X. Indeed, since Trump has described himself as a “very stable genius,” he probably doubts that there could even be an artificial intelligence greater than his own.
Kamala Harris, given her background in law enforcement, connections to Silicon Valley and the work she has already done on A.I. in the past four years, is up to this challenge, which is a key reason she has my endorsement for the presidency.
That said, one of the many oddities of the 2024 presidential election campaign is that it coincided with, but largely ignored, this blossoming of polymathic artificial general intelligence, which is going to change pretty much everything.
That is because polymathic artificial intelligence is not just smarter than humans in a single domain. It will have simultaneously mastered physics, chemistry, biology, materials science, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, Shakespeare, art history and a host of other fields better than any human ever could and be able to see patterns cutting across all of them in ways no human ever could — so it can both ask questions and provide answers that no human ever could.