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The Long Doomsday of A.I.

After industry-wide calls for regulation, what’s concerning isn’t that the problems are real. It’s that there are no guaranteed solutions.

New Yorker, By Joshua Rothman, September 16, 2026

The Turing cops . . . that’s bad heat.” That’s how people talk  in “Neuromancer,” William Gibson’s seminal science-fiction novel, from 1984. In the book’s imagined future, a police force prevents artificially intelligent computers from getting too smart. (It’s named after the mathematician Alan Turing, who basically came up with the idea of the computer, in the nineteen-forties.) Turing agents carry guns and have powers of arrest. Laws demand that a “Turing Registry” list every extant A.I. “The minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it,” someone says, of a particularly cunning computer system. “Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.”

Do we want to create the Turing Police? Proposals to do just that are currently on the table. In Congress, Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar have put forth legislation that would jail scientists who work on “superintelligence,” with terms of up to twenty years. The A.I. Kill Switch Act, proposed by Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran, would require A.I. companies to build their systems so that they can be shut down on short notice. It’s worth pausing to consider what enforcing such measures might entail. Sanders and Casar’s legislation would establish “a new Cabinet-level federal agency” dedicated to A.I. safety. Presumably, this National A.I. Agency would need to surveil the work of computer scientists. In “AI 2040,” a scenario published by the nonprofit AI Futures Project, this is accomplished through the use of physical (and hypothetical) “verification devices,” installed in data centers to detect whether computers are training new A.I.s. (Of course, any “kill switch” becomes less effective if A.I. systems can escape and find homes on the open internet.)…………………………………………………………………………………[Subscribers only] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/the-long-doomsday-of-ai?utm_mailing=tny_nl_6670_sciencetech_091926_eekx4e4yob&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&utm_content=tny_nl_6670_sciencetech_091926_eekx4e4yob&cndid=30183386&utm_term=6670

September 23, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology