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Charles Krauthammer wrote so many extraordinary columns that to single out one as the most impactful would be presumptuous, unless it is considered a statement of personal taste. There are probably as many of his most impactful writings as there have been Charles readers over the decades. Therefore, this is a nomination in the essay category that is more likely to repeat itself in the mind as events progress.
The Krauthammer column that comes back to me 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’s only 15 paragraphs, 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 exists” somewhere in the cosmos.
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Charles refers to authorities such as “Carl Sagan (among others) [who] I thought the answer” to the aliens’ lack of reach was “the high probability of advanced civilizations destroying themselves.”
“In other words,” Charles continued, “this silent universe is not conveying a flattering lesson about our uniqueness, but a tragic story of our destiny.”
“It’s telling us,” Krauthammer adds, “that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe, an endowment not only ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, almost instantaneously.”
Which brings us to the “AI” crisis: the artificial intelligence arms race.
AI itself informs me that “AI” entered the lists of topics to be discussed and debated in a structured way at a workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956. That’s far enough back in our ever-shortening news cycles to allow for not one but two “AI winters”: periods of years in which funding for research in the field dried up, partly out of fear and partly because profitability didn’t seem to be around the corner.
My slippery grip on the current trajectory of AI depends on John Ellis, whose morning newsletter “New Items” almost always includes summaries of some of the cascades of AI-related stories from around the world. Ellis edits longer stories into one or two paragraphs, thus providing an accessible summary for the average news consumer and then a link to the full story for the curious.
The daily reader of “Noticias” has the same sensation as the common dream of being behind the wheel of a car that is going at full speed and that not only does not brake, but also has the accelerator stuck on the “floor.”
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The Institute of Jungian Studies tells us that this is a “very common dream theme” and adds that the “dream message is clear: you need to slow down.”
There is a good chance of this happening when it comes to AI. There is money and power in the first to reach the Singularity.
Elon Musk declared on January 4 of this year: “We have entered the Singularity.”
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A second post from Musk followed hours later: “2026 is the year of the Singularity.”
There are many definitions of “singularity,” but a common and widely accepted one is the point at which AI surpasses human intelligence and can improve itself better than humans.
Let’s return to Krauthammer, who wanted to lift the reader’s pace a little, at least for that reader who seeks to “put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and the short and already sinister history of humanity with its new Promethean powers: intelligence is a capacity so divine, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined.”
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“Politics,” Charles concluded, “is the engine of history,” and politics “will determine whether we live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. For them, the few, the only ones, who got it right.”
So it’s up to us, citizens of the most powerful nation in history (as well as Xi Jinping and his henchmen). Although Charles Krauthammer wrote those words 15 years ago, he was referring to all crises of the past, present and future. I wasn’t reflecting on “AI,” but rather on our collective ability to reason together. His words thereafter illuminate the current debate on this pressing issue.
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The “singularity”, the “rise of the machines”, the big data that controls the battlefield both in the Russian-Ukrainian war and in our battle with Iran: all these phrases and facts express the same imperative: grab the wheel of “AI” or surrender to a nightmare that does not end well, and not only for us, but also for our children and grandchildren.
It seems destined to end in the silent cosmos with the newest contender for survival lost in the infinity of time and space. That is not inevitable. Just extremely likely. The end of humanity does not particularly worry those who have a certain religious conviction about God. There is a “plan” that we believers cling to no matter what comes our way.
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Even those who deeply trust in God’s infinite goodness must still ask themselves what God expects from mere mortals who behold the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
The answer: don’t go there.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show” is heard weekday afternoons from 3 pm to 6 pm ET on Salem Radio Network and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh brings Americans home to the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on more than 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all online streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel News Roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6 pm ET. This. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a professor of law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996, where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has appeared frequently on all major national news television networks, has hosted television programs for PBS and MSNBC, has written for every major American newspaper, and has written for a dozen. books and has moderated two dozen Republican candidate debates, most recently in November 2023. Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. This column previews the main story that will drive his radio and television show today.
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