Conclusion: At the Crossroads of the 21st Century The editorial boards of the Mercury News and the East Bay Times warned of the “dangerous impact chatbots can have on users seeking information or advice from what they believe to be trusted sources,” and urged the California State Legislature to draft laws to protect the state’s citizens from “creepy” chat- bots like Sydney. To be clear, I’m not making a case for zero regulation. Execu- tives at OpenAI have already reached out to regulators, hoping for dialogue and guidance. “We need a ton more input in this system and a lot more input that goes beyond the technolo- gies— definitely regulators and governments and everyone else,” OpenAI’s CTO, Mira Murati, told Time. “We think it’s important that efforts like ours submit to inde- pendent audits before releasing new systems,” Sam Altman said in the same essay I cited earlier. My hope is that, as this discourse evolves between developers, regulators, and other key stakeholders, we don’t fall into a reac- tionary, top-down, legislate-fast-and-break-things mindset. I hope that instead we stay future-oriented and democratic in our AI-development approaches. In the long term, the best way to create AI tools that can be used by individuals rather than on them happens when we give millions of people from around the world opportunities to par- ticipate in AI development. AI tools informed by the aspirations and experiences of many people, with different expectations, goals, and use cases, are far likelier to be more robust and more inclusive than tools developed in secrecy by computer engi- neers alone. 217