What Just HappenedCountless sci-fi stories such as The Terminator, The Matrix, and Her have warned us that we could lose control of AI. So have serious people - Geoffrey Hinton, Yuval Noah Harari, Tristan Harris - who argue that AI is dangerous precisely because we won’t be able to control it. Picture a doctor handing a powerful AI agent a directive any of us might give: wipe out all cancer. So the AI begins eliminating every organism capable of developing cancer, which is nearly all life on Earth, including us. Philosopher Shannon Vallor argues that these systems are mirrors, trained on oceans of our own data, reflecting back the same errors and failures of wisdom we keep hoping to escape (The AI Mirror, 2024).