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Scan a few headlines and you\u2019ll find, broadly speaking, that there are two schools of thought around the implications of artificial intelligence: the Cassandras and the Polyannas. But Reid Hoffman,<\/strong> a leading voice on the subject, wouldn\u2019t classify himself as either. \u201cThere are dramatics,\u201d he tells me, \u201con both sides.\u201d<\/p>\n Hoffman, a cofounder of LinkedIn, has been deeply ensconced in the field of machine learning since 2015, when he became a founding investor in OpenAI, originally a nonprofit lab that burst into public consciousness when it hard-launched ChatGPT seven years later. Since then, AI, once consigned to the realm of science fiction, has become a subject of endless allure and agita.<\/p>\n AI fans divine that the technology will revolutionize industries like health care<\/a>, retail<\/a>, law<\/a>, and manufacturing<\/a>. Critics fear that it will douse fuel onto society\u2019s proverbial fires, from misinformation<\/a> to privacy violations<\/a> to economic disruption<\/a>; some naysayers even worry that humanity itself<\/a> will become obsolete. That\u2019s also to say nothing of the AI arms race that\u2019s simmering across the Atlantic: US markets were rattled Monday by the latest from Chinese start-up DeepSeek, which now offers breakthrough AI technology at a fraction of the cost.<\/p>\n Perhaps the only thing we do know for certain about AI is that its future is un<\/em>certain. And that,<\/em> Hoffman tells me, is the impetus of his forthcoming book, Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right With Our AI Future.<\/em> In it, Hoffman and his coauthor, Greg Beato,<\/strong> make a full-throated case for AI as \u201csomething that society explores and discovers collectively.\u201d They encourage readers to engage<\/em> with AI\u2014rather than shy away from it\u2014and contend that too much regulatory oversight will only entrench economic inequities and delay the inevitable march of technological progress. \u201cOnce set in motion, new technologies exert a gravity of their own,\u201d Hoffman and Beato write. \u201cThat is precisely why prohibition or constraint alone are never enough: they offer stasis and resistance at the very moment we should be pushing forward in pursuit of the brightest possible future.\u201d<\/p>\n