I often get asked, “Is AI good or bad for humanity?” Unfortunately, I never know how to answer it properly. I answer differently every time, in fact. Depending on what I’ve been thinking and on what I’ve read most recently, sometimes I lean towards “good” and other times I lean towards “bad”… But I’ve been thinking about this more and more, and I think I now have an acceptable answer, and it’s one that merges two sentences from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book called Flow. In the book, of course, Csikszentmihalyi talks about something else completely. He talks about the flow experience and says that, like everything, flow isn’t “good” in itself. It depends on how, why, and when it’s used. And I think the same goes for AI. First of all, “it is an illusion to believe that any solution is beneficial for all people and all times; no human achievement can be taken as the final word.” But at the same time, “if mankind had tried to ban fire because it could be used to burn things down, we would not have grown to be very different from the great apes.”