Once in Manhattan in the 1990s at a lunch to celebrate a friend I met the great philanthropist Brooke Astor. The conversation took a turn and she told us a story of when she was young, in her 20s, in the 1920s. It was a summer day on the north shore of Long Island and she was at a club or great mansion of some kind with a big broad lawn. There were tables scattered along the lawn where people were eating lunch, and suddenly they heard a sound from the sky, a deep booming series of stutters. They all looked up. It was an airplane, the first any of them had ever seen. It must have taken off not far away and had trouble, and now here it was, barreling down toward them to land on the lawn. Everyone said “Oh my gosh” and scrambled out of its path. The plane touched down and came to a halt. The pilot jumped out, did something to the engine, jumped back in, started the engine, used the lawn as a runway again and took off.
It was the most amazing thing, she said, everyone was so excited.
“What happened afterward?” I asked. Meaning, what did everyone say after such a marvel?
She cocked her head. “We finished lunch.” Which, even as I write, makes me smile. Those three words captured, in my imagination, a lot about humanity, about what we’re like—you see a miracle, good, but you still have to eat—and everything about the mood of the then-still-dawning 20th century: America was chock full of miracles, they were expected. You oohed and aahed but accepted it in the course of things and finished your tuna.
Googling around the other day I saw the plane could have come from nearby Roosevelt Air Field, in Westbury, Long Island. Charles Lindbergh took off in the Spirit of St. Louis from there, in 1927, for the first solo trans-Atlantic flight, to Paris. Amelia Earhart flew out of there too, and Wiley Post. It was named for Quentin Roosevelt, Teddy’s son, a World War I combat aviator who was killed in action in an aerial dogfight over France.
Anyway it was lovely, her sweet memory of a summer day. I have recounted it from memory, didn’t take notes because I didn’t realize it would stay with me. It’s come to mind after 10 summer days in Manhattan and on Long Island, of conversations with all manner of folk. I think I sense a general mood of carefulness about the future, a sobriety that isn’t down, precisely, but is, well, watchful.
At almost every gathering artificial intelligence came up. I’d say people are approaching AI with a free floating dread leavened by a pragmatic commitment to make the best of it, see what it can do to make life better. It can’t be stopped any more than you can stop the tide. There’s a sense of, “It may break cancer’s deepest codes,” combined with, “It may turn on us and get us nuked.”
My offered thought: AI’s founders, funders and promoters made a big recent show of asking Congress to help them fashion moral guardrails, but to my mind there was little comfort in it. I think they had three motives. First, to be seen as humble and morally serious—aware of the complexities of this awesome new power and asking for help in thinking them through. Second, they are certain government is too incompetent and stupid to slow them down or impede them in any meaningful way, so why not. Third, when something goes wrong they can say, “But we pleaded for your help!”
That unfriendly read is based on 30 years of observing our tech leaders. They have a sense of responsibility to their vision and to their own genius, but not to people at large or the American people in particular. They always claim they’re looking for better communication and greater joy between peoples when in the end it turns out they’re looking for money and power. And they only see the sunny side of their inventions because they were raised in a sunny age, and can’t imagine what darkness looks like, or that it comes.
A subject that came up only once, and indirectly, is Ukraine. I think support for that country is no longer the unalloyed thing it was. People once eager to discuss it now don’t. Time passes and doubts creep in. The loss in blood and treasure is high, the West is simultaneously proudly united and out on a limb, and Russia is in a way already defeated (huge financial and reputational loss, military humiliation, its government revealed as ridiculous). Vladimir Putin is possibly a psychopath and gives every sign of going out like Al Pacino in “Scarface”—“Say hello to my little friend.”
We don’t know where this goes. All who call for a battlefield victory as opposed to some sort of attempt at a negotiated settlement, unsatisfying as that would be, will probably eventually have to factor this in: that public sentiment means something, always, and it can change. Last week we hit 500 days since Mr. Putin invaded. People don’t like long wars.
I tried the patience of a foreign-policy specialist by saying that if China were thinking creatively it would stun the world by pushing itself forward as mediator and peacemaker. China has natural sway with Mr. Putin, but also would with Volodymyr Zelensky, who must be thinking of his country’s potentially brilliant postwar future in tech and industry. Two things Ukrainians have shown: They are a gifted people, and they are a people. You can go far with that. Anyway, everyone wants to be friends with big bad China. Xi Jinping has the standing to make a move. It would improve his country’s reputation after a dozen years in which that reputation has grown dark and menacing. Why not make a move that surprises the world?
A foreign-affairs specialist said this was a romantic idea. True enough. But the problem with the world isn’t that there’s too much romance in it, is it?
I close with a small lunch at a white-walled restaurant on Long Island. Present were accomplished foreign-policy thinkers and lawyers. After something said at dinner the previous night, the subject of ghosts crossed my mind. What do you think, I asked, are they real? Suddenly we were off to the races. One was a skeptic but the kind of skeptic who’s clearly spent time thinking about it. Another thought ghosts a real phenomena—the ghost of his late father, an artist, was seen in his studio. This led my mind to the enduring mystery of prophecies and dreams in history—Lincoln’s repetitive dream before major Union victories, his prophetic dream of his own death. Dreams are . . . something. Not just your mind at rest firing off neurons, not just an undigested piece of cheese, not only expressions of repression or family dynamics in the Freudian sense. They are something we don’t know. Maybe AI will figure it out.
Then the talk turned to magic. It was nice—all these smart and accomplished rational thinkers agreeing there’s a lot of mystery in life, things all around us that we don’t know, forces we can’t see and don’t credit, and that it’s all connected somehow to a magic within life. Hearing they thought this—it was sweet.