Charles Krauthammer wrote so many extraordinary columns that to single out one as the most impactful would be presumptuous, unless qualified to be a statement of personal taste.There are probably as many most impactful of his writings as there are readers of Charles over the decades.
So, this is a nomination in the category of essay most likely to recur in the mind as events march on.The Krauthammer column that returns to my mind again and again is one he wrote for The Washington Post on December 29, 2011 and which he included in his carefully curated first collection of writings, "Things That Matter," a column under the title "Are We Alone In The Universe?"It is a mere 15 paragraphs, which are all packed with information about physicists and astronomy, the "Fermi Paradox" and the "Drake Equation." In those 800 words Charles posed the question of why "we have found no evidence — no signals, no radio waves — that intelligent life does exist" out there somewhere in the cosmos.APOCALYPSE NOW? WHY THE MEDIA ARE SUDDENLY FREAKING OUT ABOUT AICharles references authorities such as "Carl Sagan (among others) [who] thought the answer" for the lack of ET’s outreach was "the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.""In other words," Charles continued, "this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story of our destiny.""It is telling us," Krauthammer adds, "that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so."Which brings us to the "AI" crisis — the artificial intelligence arms race.AI itself informs me that "AI" entered into the lists of subjects to be discussed and debated in a structured fashion at a workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956.That is sufficiently far enough back in our ever-shortening news cycles to allow for not one but two "AI winters" — stretches of years when fu...