Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit

Men Wanted: For hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.4 The ad may have been apocryphal, but the sacrifice it illustrates was not. These were the realities of exploration only a century ago: Our progress on the frontier was limi

Analogously, after the U.S. won the space race, without a competitor to motivate its national efforts, support in Washington for space exploration languished and the budget of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was cut. Over the span of five decades, America’s capacity for crewed spaceflight steadily degraded. From being the s

The rise of private, for-profit corporations—which allow the pooling of investment and risk—unlocked additional possibilities.

The astronauts themselves could be considered pioneers, but none of the ventures into space undertaken by Moscow and Washington were the product of an individualistic gamble of life and fortune. Rather, each was a coordinated diplomatic and military mission, powered by enormous investments of money, time, and latitude for experimentation.

Where war is considered tantamount to national suicide, surrender may appear the lesser of two evils.”

Zheng He’s voyages, closer in their origins and motives to the modern American and Soviet space programs than to Western equivalents at his time, were not so much leaps into the unknown as the rich products of imperial statecraft. But therein also lies a problem. The very things needed to ensure an expedition’s success, even within a well-resourced

Undeterred by failure, Shackleton would later make further expeditions to the South Pole. For decades, a story (later debunked) circulated that he had placed the following ad in the London Times:

The existence of alternative backers has been critical to sustained exploration.

Although as a doctoral student Kissinger had immersed himself in the diplomatic history of early-nineteenth-century Europe, he was keenly aware throughout his career that the eternal patterns of great-power politics were subject to periodic disruption by technological change.

Artificial intelligence is of course different from nuclear fission in a host of ways. But it would be a grave error to assume that we shall use this new technology more for productive than for potentially destructive purposes.