Walter Isaacson finally got scared about AI

On live TV he called an alleged AI “escape” the first thing that truly worried him. The argument that followed matters more than the story itself.

Walter Isaacson was on CNBC’s Squawk Box this week, and he said something you don’t often hear from him. He’s an AI optimist — he thinks it creates jobs and is genuinely useful. But this, he said, is the first thing that flat-out scared him.

Isaacson is worth a listen on this. He’s spent years around the people building AI — he wrote the biographies of S…