Editor's Letter

Susan Casey, who uncovers new details about the final, fatal journey of the Titan submersible in this issue, has been participating in and reporting on deepsea expeditions for years, so when she describes Titan's last descent as a "tragedy-in-waiting," she does so with earned expertise. The ocean, as Casey writes, is an inexorable force against which glib tech mantras like "move fast and break things" have no traction—the thing you break is most likely to be your own. Exploration obviously carries risk, and even the best efforts at managing it cannot prevent disaster. Think of the space shuttle Challenger explosion, witnessed in devastating real time by the youth of my generation. But the story of the Titan—and the story of the Titanic, for that matter—are a reminder that the race to innovate is often powered by hubris. The great shroud of the sea rolls on, and all we're left with is sorrow for the loss.

PELL-MELL INNOVATION is also the topic of Nick Bilton's feature on artificial intelligence, although the relevant parties might disagree on the form of hubris involved. Are we hopeless narcissists to pursue the invention in the first place? Or is it vainglorious on the part of Homo sapiens, as Larry Page seems to have it, to assume we'll always have a monopoly on planetary dominance? Maybe we're destined to step aside for a machine species that plays Adam to our fusty Old Testament God. And wouldn't it be poetic justice for AI to solve a problem like, say, climate change by eradicating its primary cause, i.e., people? The AI train has left the station, as Nick reports, and as it makes its presence known everywhere from journalism to film to medicine, it puts us stubborn humans in the position of embracing new capabilities while asserting values like creativity and originality; we are making the case for ourselves to ourselves. For defenders of the humanities, this is a familiar refrain—could AI have written Moby-Dick? Would it have bothered to?—but the stakes have never been higher. Tapping the brakes on technological advances has a historically poor track record, but it would be nice to maintain control of the wheel. Some say the world will end in fire, some say gray goo—read Nick's piece and you'll see how appetizing that looks. I understand the tidy paradox of being outsmarted by our own exceedingly clever inventionafter all, that twist has been the stuff of literature for centuries, and my generation saw the movie 2001 when it was still a vision of the future. But I'm enough of a humanist to hope that our funny, irrational existence can keep the machines guessing.

RADHIKA JONES

Editor in Chief