So the special issue of Wired Magazine edited by Barack Obama has just come out, and I wanted to draw attention to Mark Zuckerberg’s response to the President’s challenge to “ensure that artificial intelligence helps rather than hurts us.” Somehow, someway, this issue has to move away from the ‘superintelligence’ debate and toward a collective conversation on the impact of AI on human cognitive ecology. Zuckerberg’s response betrays a tragic lack of understanding from the man who, arguably, has already transformed our social cognitive ecologies more radically than any other individual in the history of the human race. Anyone knowing some way of delivering this message from steerage up to the bridge, forward the bloody thing, because the combination of this naivete with the growing ubiquity of AI is becoming, ahem, a little scary. The more baked-in the existing trends become, the harder the hard decisions will become.

Zuckerberg begins his response to Obama’s challenge sounding very much like a typical…