When I was a little girl, a hundred dollars was a great deal of money. A thousand dollars was a fortune. A hundred thousand was practically unimaginable.
And then came the millionaires, the billionaires, and eventually the trillionaires.
Somewhere along the way, I gave up trying to picture all those zeroes and settled on a perfectly satisfactory mathematical expression: a gazillion.
Scrooge McDuck had his swimming pool filled with money. I had my imagination.
But now, at seventy-five, I’m being told that artificial intelligence could become a million times more powerful in just a few years.
And suddenly, I find myself thinking less about Uncle Scrooge and more about HAL 9000.
Because I was there when Stanley Kubrick introduced us to a computer that could think, speak, reason—and decide that its human companions were expendable.
So perhaps the question isn’t whether AI will become a million times more powerful…
Perhaps it’s whether human beings can learn to understand and use that power without surrendering the qualities that make us human.
