An MIT verdict on artificial intelligence 

GETTING the regulation of artificial intelligence right is one of the most urgent problems facing our species, and also one of the most delicate. AI has the potential to improve most aspects of our lives – Alphabet Inc’s chief executive officer Sundar Pichai argues that its impact will be “more profound than electricity or fire”. It also has the potential to damage them profoundly – in one survey of AI researchers, 48 per cent thought that there was at least a 10 per cent chance that its impact would be “extremely bad”, that is, lead to human extinction.

How can we maximise the upside of the new technology and minimise the downside?

This is the subject at the heart of an important new book by two prominent economists. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson are professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the leading temples in the cult of tech. Acemoglu is the co-author (with James Robinson) of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. Johnson is a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. In Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, they look at a millennium of technological innovation to understand the likely impact of AI.