In which I talk to my 90-year-old dad about
how we might survive and maybe even
benefit from the AI revolution

I got myself a $600 “no insurance” ticket last week, and AI had a hand in it.¹ I passed a police car on the roadside, wondering why he was blocking traffic and making everyone choke down to one lane. I figured it out when the officer who pulled me over explained that car had a camera in it, and that it had told him I didn’t have insurance.

Fair cop. It had totally slipped my mind, our insurance provider doesn’t provide insurance expiration warnings, and I’d rather have insurance than not. I would have rather not got that reminder in the form of a ticket, but it did make the world feel a little smaller. Even when it’s made a little safer by making sure all cars on the road are insured.

Or as Matt Damon recently pointed out, Jason Bourne would have a hell of a time making multiple passports work in a world where AI/machine learning facial recognition is the norm at airports. It’s hard cross boundaries as a ghost when identification is instantaneous and tied to things you can’t change, like the distance between your eyes.²

Which, again, isn’t always a bad thing. Just because the identification is mostly accurate most of the time, done automatically by ‘infallible’ machines, doesn’t mean that mistakes don’t get made. And who wants to be face-down on the pavement, at gun-point, with their six-year-old, because of a database oopsie?³

Why shouldn’t we invest all our time and money perfecting super AI that took care of all our problems, so that we wouldn’t have to worry about things like jobs and working? Why wouldn’t we want AI to take care of everything, smooth out the wrinkles of the early prototypes, and let the super intelligence loose on the world, once we’ve improved it, to make our lives better? “Hey, isn’t this great? We can lower the work week. We can guarantee healthcare, high quality health care to everybody. We can expand life expectancy. We can solve global warming. Man, let’s go do it.”⁴

Goeffry Hinton, the godfather of AI, in the same conversation⁵ responded thus:

“If we had political system that was run for the benefit of the people, that’s exactly what we should do. We should have very powerful AI that does everything for us. We should be very careful to design it so it cares more about us than it does about itself.”

So, if we can ethically regulate AI (keep it out of children’s and bad actors’ hands, use it for good not wealth accumulation or world domination, avoid social revolution and the collapse of democratic government, corporate malfeasance, and straight-up human extinction) . . .

But that’s not what’s happening. Right now AI is in the hands of a very few, very rich people and their shareholders, beholden by the profit (& power) motive. I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue that Zuckerberg, Bezos, or Musk have the best interests of humanity at heart. Even if they did, at the time of this writing, the liberal democracy that has build prosperity (however imperfectly) for the last eighty years seems to be falling apart.⁶

Nobody is watching the watchers. No one is policing the technology.

That can all feel overwhelming, but

It is a solvable problem.

Just like previously we solved nuclear proliferation and the hole in the ozone layer. Every government (or enough of the right ones) need to recognize the threat, and agree to do something about it. This is the hard part, and in today’s global political climate, well.

Easy to say, hard to do. Especially if you consider the influence those that currently control/profit from technology have on governments and public discourse.

What can we as individual humans do? Get educated on the current issues, Play with the technology (there are lots of free applications out there, more everyday). Get familiar with what it looks and feels like, so that when you encounter it in the wild you’re more likely to recognize it. Learn its weaknesses so you can make good choices and speak knowledgeably.

A good place to start includes Yuaval Noah Harari’s “Nexus — A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI”. Your local library should have multiple copies, and it’s available as an audio book. 

And take care of yourself. Remember that the solution can’t and doesn’t depend on the heroic efforts of one or even several people. But by being educated and engaged, building a community & relationships with like-minded people, speaking up when its appropriate, holding political leaders accountable (from your condo board on up) , any of the above or all of the above, you are doing your part.

Stay safe.

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1. I’m not one of those guys who rails against the ‘guverment’ because ‘speeding tickets is just a money grab’. Don’t want a speeding ticket? Don’t speed. Same with this little oopsie – I’ll eat the ticket knowing that I was able to fix my lack of insurance roadside and carry on. Ignorantly not having insurance and then having an accident would have been much much worse for everyone concerned. I’m a little pissed that my insurer didn’t follow up, but that’s a different issue. ↩︎
2. I did feel a little sad that the world feels a little smaller every time I encounter being tracked out in the world. How are kids supposed to get in trouble, and get themselves out of it – a big part of my growing up – if they’re always being watched? What privacy is left us in the world? When AI is being used to track us and shrink our privacy, that bothers me. ↩︎
3. Found this interesting AI Incident Database while researching this article, for those who are interested in going deeper ↩︎
4. Senator Bernie Sanders, dir. 2025. The Billionaires’ Plan for AI | Sen. Bernie Sanders. 1:53. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h30Np0mnPDs. Thanks to Gordo for sending me this clip ↩︎
5. Same ↩︎
6. n the news this week: Trump is threatening to declare martial law in Minnesota, NATO is moving troops to Iceland in solidarity with Denmark against the U.S., China finished conducting invasion drills around Taiwan, Iran in open revolt against the Mullahs, and Russian has just conducted a cyber-attack against Ukraine’s power grid, something something Venezuela… ↩︎