Time Magazine named Artificial Intelligence (AI) as its 2025 Person of the Year. The corresponding article highlighted reasons for optimism and reasons for great concern.
There is cause for optimism because AI has the potential to radically transform development of new pharmaceuticals and greatly improve medical diagnoses. It also has the potential to help many people do their jobs more effectively and predict the weather much better than our current methods.
There is cause for great concern because AI has the potential to eliminate many jobs (especially when combined with robotics), increase social isolation, and greatly exacerbate the wealth gap.
Amidst this uncertainty, two things are certain: AI will make some wealthy individuals much richer and AI will increasingly become part of the political debate.
Notable industry leaders like Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang (CEO of Nvidia) and Mark Zuckerberg stand to gain trillions of dollars from the development and implementation of AI. These wealthy individuals will also spend hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to convince you, the voter, to vote for candidates who will advance their agendas, i.e., little or no government regulation of AI.
If past history is any guide, they will use scare tactics in their advertising campaigns. “If you don’t vote for Candidate X we will be surrendering our future to China.”
As informed voters, we should treat all political ads with a healthy degree of skepticism. This goes double for pro-AI political ads. The wealthy individuals who pay for these ads have their own self-interests in mind, not yours. Without sensible regulation, AI has the potential become our master, not our servant. The choice is yours (at least for now).
— Peter Birschbach, Port Royal
