Software-based accidents are still incredibly rare, Clive Thompson, the author of the new book Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, told me in an interview. And yet, when we consider a future in which our lives are dictated by lines of code, there is vast potential for unforeseen trouble. “If we’re going to have big robot devices zooming around us all day long, we’re going to need rigorous review of the code. That’s clear. We’re moving to a world where F.A.A.-like regulation will reach into lots of newfangled machines,” Thompson told me. “It’s not going to be easy, and there’ll always be risk. Software’s complex, so it’s hard to tell how it’ll behave in everyday life. The F.A.A. already regulates aircraft software pretty tightly, yet we got the Max 8 catastrophe.”

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We are now repeating the same myopic mistakes that we made during the rise of social media, with potentially more dangerous consequences. Across the globe, companies are racing to move A.I. and automation out of labs and into our driveways, schools, financial markets, and battlefields. And we have no idea whether we’re putting ourselves and our society in imminent danger. Certainly our government is doing nothing to stop or slow the inevitable. Hundreds of billions of dollars in shareholder value are waiting to be unlocked by these technologies, which will allow us to watch Netflix or YouTube videos (and plenty of ads) instead of touching a steering wheel. The question we should be asking is: are we setting ourselves up for a future that we won’t be able to turn off?

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