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Charles Krauthammer wrote so many extraordinary columns that to single out one as the most impactful would be presumptuous, unless qualified to be a statement of personal taste. There are probably as many most impactful of his writings as there are readers of Charles over the decades. So, this is a nomination in the category of essay most likely to recur in the mind as events march on.
The Krauthammer column that returns to my mind again and again is one he wrote for The Washington Post on December 29, 2011 and which he included in his carefully curated first collection of writings, “Things That Matter,” a column under the title “Are We Alone In The Universe?”
It is a mere 15 paragraphs, which are all packed with information about physicists and astronomy, the “Fermi Paradox” and the “Drake Equation.” In those 800 words Charles posed the question of why “we have found no evidence — no signals, no radio waves — that intelligent life does exist” out there somewhere in the cosmos.
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Charles references authorities such as “Carl Sagan (among others) [who] thought the answer” for the lack of ET’s outreach was “the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.”
“In other words,” Charles continued, “this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story of our destiny.”
“It is telling us,” Krauthammer adds, “that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so.”
Which brings us to the “AI” crisis — the artificial intelligence arms race.
AI itself informs me that “AI” entered into the lists of subjects to be discussed and debated in a structured fashion at a workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956. That is sufficiently far enough back in our ever-shortening news cycles to allow for not one but two “AI winters” — stretches of years when funding for research in the field dried up, partly out of fear and partly because profitability did not seem to around the corner.
My slippery grip on AI’s current trajectory depends upon John Ellis, whose morning newsletter “New Items” almost always includes summaries of some of the cascade of AI-related stories from around the world. Ellis edits the longer stories down to a paragraph or two, thus providing a summary that is accessible to the average news consumer and then a link to the full story for the curious.
A daily reader of “News Items” gets the same sense as that of the common dream of being behind the wheel of a speeding car that will not only not brake, but in which the accelerator is stuck on “floored.”
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The Institute for Jungian Studies tells us that this is a “very common dream theme,” and adds that the “message from the dream is clear: you need to slow down.”
Fat chance of that when it comes to AI. There is money and power in the first to arrive at the Singularity.
Elon Musk declared on January 4 of this year: “We have entered the Singularity.”
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A second Musk post followed hours later: “2026 is the year of the Singularity.”
There are lots of definitions of the “Singularity,” but a common, widely accepted one is the point at which AI surpasses human intelligence and can improve itself better than humans can.
Back to Krauthammer, who wanted to put some lift in the reader’s step, at least for that reader looking “to put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and on humanity’s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined.”
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“Politics,” Charles concluded, “is the driver of history,” and politics “will determine whether we live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few — the only — who got it right.”
So it is up to us, citizens of the most powerful nation in history (as well as Xi Jinping and his minions.) Though Charles Krauthammer penned those words 15 years ago he was speaking to every crisis of the past, present and future. He was not musing on “AI” but rather on our collective capacity to reason together. His words from then illuminate the current debate on this most pressing topic.
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The “singularity,” the “rise of the machines,” big data controlling the battlefield in both the Russo-Ukraine War and our battle with Iran — all these phrases and facts dot-dash-dot out the same imperative: Get a grip on the wheel of “AI” or give yourselves over to a nightmare that doesn’t end well, and not just for us, but our children and grandchildren.
It seems destined to end in the silent cosmos with the most recent contender to survive lost in infinity of time and space. That’s not inevitable. Only extremely probable. The end of humanity doesn’t particularly disturb those with a certain religious conviction about God. There is a “plan” that believers hold to no matter what comes our way.
Even those profoundly confident of God’s infinite goodness must still ask what does God expect of mere mortals staring at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?
The answer: Don’t go there.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show” heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
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