Salman Ansari

The first moment where I realized that art and writing has a place in community organizing was during a city council hearing with people in power. It was about the rezoning of Jerome Avenue which would change the landscape of one of the longest streets in the Bronx. During that hearing, I went up there and I read a poem. I hadn’t planned to read that poem. I just decided at the last minute to do it and I saw how much that shifted the room. I wasn’t saying anything that other people weren’t saying. [The poem] encapsulated the feeling, the frustration, the anger and the pride in being someone from the Bronx. It really moved people.

But here’s the problem: These estimates don’t capture the near future of how we’ll use AI. In that future, we won’t simply ping AI models with a question or two throughout the day, or have them generate a photo. Instead, leading labs are racing us toward a world where AI “agents” perform tasks for us without our supervising their every move.

As I understand them, the founders of AI–Alan Turing, Herbert Simon, Marvin Minsky, and others–regarded it as science, part of the then-emerging cognitive sciences, making use of new technologies and discoveries in the mathematical theory of computation to advance understanding. Over the years those concerns have faded and have largely been displaced by an engineering orientation. The earlier concerns are now commonly dismissed, sometimes condescendingly, as GOFAI–good old-fashioned AI.