This article is part of our special section on the DealBook Summit that included business and policy leaders from around the world.747 live

Powerful technologies have always been double-edged swords. That’s been true since fire; it could cook your food and keep you warm, but, out of control, burn down your hut.

Modern artificial intelligence is poised to take the mixed-blessing principle to new heights, a technology moving faster and further than anything seen before. That was the prevailing view of 10 leading technologists and tech policy experts in a discussion on Dec. 4 at the DealBook Summit in New York, led by Kevin Roose, a columnist for The New York Times and co-host of the “Hard Fork” podcast.

Big tech, venture capital, nonprofits and academia were all represented on the panel. The group was mainly a collection of people who believe that artificial intelligence is rapidly advancing. To start off, Mr. Roose asked for a show of hands of those who agreed with the statement that there was a 50 percent chance or better that artificial general intelligence — a system with the ability to outperform human experts at virtually all cognitive tasks — would be achieved by 2030. Seven hands went up.

Smarter-than-humans technology could deliver “a century of scientific progress in 10 years,” said Jack Clark, co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic, a richly funded A.I. start-up.

Peter Lee, the president of Microsoft’s research division, said he was excited by how the underlying mathematical models that had excelled at learning from human language to create chatbots like ChatGPT were “just as adept at learning from nature.”

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Calls for school crackdowns have mounted with reports of cyberbullying among adolescents and studies indicating that smartphones, which offer round-the-clock distraction and social media access, have hindered academic instruction and the mental health of children.

Overall, violent crime fell 3 percent and property crime fell 2.6 percent in 2023, with burglaries down 7.6 percent and larceny down 4.4 percent. Car thefts, though, continue to be an exception, rising more than 12 percent from the year before.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.747 live