Thank you for this excellent piece. One comment: I have great respect for Joi Ito and for others who stress the need to include the general public in decisions regarding AI and other disruptive technologies (CRISPR, for example). It’s an admirable sentiment, and I’m certainly not in favor of secrecy — this piece does an excellent job of pointing out the problems with that. However, I think it’s naive to think that future applications of these technologies are going to be determined by anyone but the experts. Is it too cynical to believe that the general public is either uninterested, too distracted, or simply lacking in the skills necessary to weigh in significantly on these issues? Reading the public comments on the Obama administration’s report on AI would suggest otherwise. Public relations is one thing (fears have quite reasonably been stoked by the reams of publicity regarding AI’s potential to replace millions of jobs); actively participating in guiding the development of AI is something else again. And as this author points out so well, whether ethics or the profit motive win out in those decisions is very much an open question.