Kara Swisher: AI Isn’t Going to Destroy Humanity—But the People Building It Might

As the AI industry likes to tell it, superintelligent bots could one day cure cancer and end poverty.

Or in the worst-case scenario, they might wipe out all humans from the face of the Earth.

In recent weeks, Silicon Valley’s existential concerns about the technology it is racing to build have blown up.

The tech journalist Kara Swisher sees it differently.

“We have to stop thinking AI is going to kill humanity,” she told Atlantic executive editor Adrienne LaFrance at The Atlantic Festival.

If the AI future goes sideways, bots won’t be to blame.

People will be.

“These are people at the helm of these things.” In the several decades that Swisher has covered Silicon Valley—formerly as a reporter at The Wall Street Journal , now as the host of two podcasts—she says that she’s seen tech whizzes make the same mistake again and again: failing to take proper precautions against the products they are building.

“One of the things about tech people is they’re the smartest people in the world, in case you need to know, because they like to tell you,” she said.

In her interview with LaFrance, Swisher also discussed the economic implications of the AI race, who is likely to win, and how Americans can respond to this dizzying and worrying AI moment.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Adrienne LaFrance: You have been paying attention to the tech world and AI for basically ever.

And now it seems like within the past, say, two weeks, the rest of the world is suddenly paying much closer attention.

So I wanted to start just by talking about where you think we are, in this moment.