A robot named “Lightning” just set the world’s record in the half-marathon. But robots now think like lightning too. Artificial Intelligence. AI. Elon Musk just declared, “It could kill us all.” What fresh hell is this?

AI is a super-technology, “it’s a machine doing things we thought only people could do.” AI “dwarfs the power of all other technologies combined.” AI “learns by itself,” it can “digest the entire Internet,” it will be “smarter than all humans.”

As you know, I am 86 years old, and I certainly won’t live very long, but chances are, some experts say, our world will be run by robots before I die. “It will mean,” warns one dystopian critic, “the abrupt termination of humanity.”

Technology has come a long, long way in my lifetime. My first recollection of involvement with “the machine” is hanging out our living room window at age 8 in 1948 transmitting instructions from my mother in front of our first television to my father adjusting the antenna on the roof – so we could watch Milton Berle on Texaco Star Theater.

Now there’s widespread fear of a future AI world far surpassing Orwell’s 1984, “an authoritarian’s dream.” And consequently a modern-day Luddite just firebombed the house of Samuel Altman, developer of ChatGPT, a leading model of artificial intelligence now on the market.

But for me, déjà vu. It’s a time to decide not destroy, to shape not smash. On the eve of the computer revolution in the early 1970s, I taught large classes on Technology and Human Values, calling attention to the need to separate the promise of the new technology from its peril.

I have a kind of classroom still. Betty and I have a Little Free Library (see and join Greenwich Garden Little Free Library on Facebook) where we will soon kick off an activity called “Blind Date with a Robot,” in which library users will be enticed to take a book on the AI revolution at random in a sealed envelope, not knowing what they’re getting, to sensitize themselves to the issues AI raises and the dangers it poses.

AI is here to stay: it’s up to us to decide how to use it for our benefit.