When ChatGPT appeared on the scene in late 2022, I was convinced I was cooked. The artificial intelligence tool wrote as well as I did, sometimes better, and I didn’t see a place for myself in the future economy. Still, I knew that if I had any chance of surviving as a writer, I had to be an early adopter of it. In the past three years I’ve devoted myself full-time to using, studying and learning about A.I. Earlier this year I published “The Thinking Machine,” a biography of Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, the world’s leading maker of A.I. chips. Huang’s near monopoly on the sector has made him perhaps the most powerful man in A.I., but when I asked him about some of the potential risks of these systems, he brushed me off. When I kept asking, he grew impatient and told me that the question was a waste of his time. I haven’t stopped asking it, though. For a guest essay in Times Opinion this week, I interviewed researchers who study how A.I. is advancing, what it’s capable of and what threat it might pose. Forget my profession; is A.I. going to kill us all? Some of these experts told me that there is no reason to fear truly catastrophic risks, like a pathogen engineered by A.I. to wipe out humanity. Others told me that they worry such risks may be around the corner. The only point of consensus was that A.I. keeps getting smarter and smarter — and it is not slowing down. The more I learn about A.I., the harder it is to imagine the future. I do not think the day is very far away when this technology will be able to do every aspect of my job. My hope is that as A.I. becomes more powerful, human connection — the one thing computers can’t replicate — will become ever more valuable, and that I will still have a place. That’s the optimistic scenario, anyway.
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