Conclusion: At the Crossroads of the 21st Century phones, and all the superpowers they enable, are so embedded in my life now. A life without smartphones? Impossible! Obviously, we didn’t get here overnight. In the first half of the 1990s, humanity spent thousands of aggregate hours listen- ing to the existential screech of our 28.8k modems. In the late 1990s, it still took longer to download an MP3 of “Free Bird” than it takes to get a Gopuff delivery today. And, in building out all these technologies that enabled the internet and smartphones, we ushered in a new world of cyber- crime, with current global costs of around $8.4 trillion a year (according to Statista.com). The National Safety Council esti- mates that U.S. automobile collisions caused by texting while driving cause nearly 400,000 injuries per year. Obviously, we’ve responded in part to these negative external- ities with regulation: we have laws that prohibit digital fraud and driving while texting. While we could make the laws more stringent, or enforce them more than we do, so far we haven’t. Instead, we as a culture collectively accept some level of risk and loss as a cost of having smartphones in our lives—in fact, a fair amount of risk and loss—because of all the ways we find smartphones immensely useful. Will it be different for AI? Smartphones were built off a long legacy of familiar prede- cessors; we’d been pretty comfortable with phones of various kinds for some time. In contrast, AI tools that simulate human 213