Two topics dominated the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos last week: Donald Trump and artificial intelligence. Of the two, the latter was the more interesting and almost certainly the more significant. Much attention in the discussion was devoted to DeepSeek, the surprise Chinese upstart. Yet we have merely learned that knowledge spreads: no country is going to monopolise these new technologies. This has surprised markets. With new technologies, such “surprises” are not surprising. But it does not change the big question, which is what advancing machine intelligence means for us all.
Human beings are both social and intelligent. This combination is their “killer app”. It has allowed them to dominate the planet. Human intelligence invented the general purpose technologies that shaped the world, from the taming of fire to the creation of computers. But, with computers that think, this might change. Blaise Pascal, the French 17th-century mathematician and philosopher, said that “Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.” Is that uniqueness now coming to an end?
