A Pew Research Center survey published in September found that 50 percent of respondents were more concerned than excited about AI; just 10 percent felt the opposite. Most people, 57 percent, said the societal risks were high, while a mere 25 percent thought the benefits would be high. In another poll, only 2 percent — 2 percent! — of respondents said they fully trust AI’s capability to make fair and unbiased decisions, while 60 percent somewhat or fully distrusted it. Standing athwart the development of AI and yelling “Stop!” is quickly emerging as one of the most popular positions on both ends of the political spectrum.

Our contradictory feelings are captured in the chart of the year from the Dallas Fed forecasting how AI might affect the economy in the future:

We really need better ideas But before I get there, here’s the bad news: There’s growing evidence that humanity is generating fewer new ideas.

Professor AI, at your service The clearest example out there is AlphaFold, the Google DeepMind system that predicts the 3D shape of proteins from their amino-acid sequences — a problem that used to take months or years of painstaking lab work per protein. Today, thanks to AlphaFold, biologists have high-quality predictions for essentially the entire protein universe sitting in a database, which makes it much easier to design the kind of new drugs, vaccines, and enzymes that help improve health and productivity.