Cars, nukes and cellphones can help us predict the future of AI

Opinion>Opinions - Technology The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill Cars, nukes and cellphones can help us predict the future of AI Comments: by Harlan Ullman, opinion contributor - 08/10/26 12:30 PM ET Comments: Link copied by Harlan Ullman, opinion contributor - 08/10/26 12:30 PM ET Comments: Link copied

Michael Dwyer, Associated Press file The OpenAI logo is displayed on a cellphone with an image on a computer monitor generated by ChatGPT’s Dall-E text-to-image model, Dec. 8, 2023, in Boston.

What is the future of artificial intelligence? Movies can provide a first cut, but historical context with other tectonic inventions and events can help determine if AI will prove to be a force for good, ill or in-between.

With AI models by Anthropic and OpenAI recently escaping from control and hacking into other organizations, is this a case of “Jurassic Park,” when the Tyrannosauruses were accidentally let loose? Or is this “The Terminator,” when a Frankenstein version of the AI program Skynet ran the future world?

Three revolutionary inventions can serve as possible future guides about AI: the car, nuclear weapons — appropriate, given this month’s anniversary of atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — and the cellphone.

After the turn of the 20th century, cars and internal combustion machines transformed society, spawning industries and generating jobs to support more than a billion of these machines. Steel, coal, oil, rubber and other raw materials were essential. So was the need for electric power for factories. Roads and highways were built across the globe. Hospitality industries boomed with gas stations, hotels and eateries populating the new highways. Stocks, insurance and auto loans formed and prospered.

But cars have downsides. Roadway and highway expansion required the acquisition of huge plots of real estate that raised issues regarding rights-of-way and ownership. Pollution became a critical environmental issue. And accidents and motor vehicle deaths — the leading cause of deaths in the U.S. — show that autos are not entirely positive.

Nuclear weapons became a reality in 1945, first in tests over the New Mexico desert and then in the bombings of Japan. On the one hand, nuclear energy — which produced electric power for the first time in 1951 — could provide unlimited energy generation. On the other hand, thermonuclear weapons that are 1,000 times more powerful than atomic bombs could destroy society as we know it. Plutonium-239, the preferred source for weapons, could contaminate the planet with radioactivity for millennia, given their 24,000 year half-life.

Fortunately, no nuclear weapons have been used in anger since 1945. And so far, nuclear states have learned how to control these carriers of mass destruction. The peacetime use of nuclear power has persisted. But storage of nuclear waste has created an extensive political debate. And accidents at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear facility in 1979 and Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011 — in which no one was killed or harmed — did huge damage to public perceptions about the safety and danger of nuclear power.

Likewise, cellphones have transformed society. Previously unimaginable human interactions can now be performed using cellphones. A revolution in employment has come with this new technology.

But there are real downsides. They can become addictive. For the young, and even for older generations, cellphones provide the major means of communications with the outside world through social media, streaming news and potentially misleading websites. Politics are now driven by social media and cellphones. Understanding the long-term consequences of this shift will not occur easily or quickly.

What does this mean for AI? It could become even more present than automobiles, bringing with it infrastructure changes, employment opportunities and the ability to substitute AI for humans in the workforce.

AI could potentially create doomsday scenarios, much like thermonuclear weapons, or evolve to the sinister intelligence portrayed in “The Terminator.” Or the risks can be controlled and minimized while offering a new economy of prospects for jobs and employment opportunities.

The ambiguity of cellphones might be most applicable to AI. AI could positively impact society by curing diseases and other breakthroughs. Yet, the possibility of an uncontrolled AI model being accidentally released, or AI out-thinking humans and deciding that it is more capable of running the world, cannot be dismissed.

These are the boundaries. My instincts are that, like all transformative technologies and events, none are flawless in practice, but none are as malignant as pessimists predict. Constraints on nuclear weapons use make this point.

One hopes that’s enough to avoid a future AI dystopia.

Harlan Ullman is senior adviser at Washington’s Atlantic Council, chairman of a private company, and principal author of the doctrine of shock and awe. His next book, co-written with Field Marshal The Lord David Richards, former United Kingdom chief of defense and due out this Fall, is “Who Thinks Best Wins: How Decisive Strategic Thinking Will Prevent Global Chaos.”