Current metaphors for thinking about AI will completely miss its most important consequences, just like thinking about cars as horseless carriages and other analogies to "things we know" completely missed the mark of how steam engines actually transformed society. - from @zeynep 's keynote at #NeurIPS More profound than the simplified scares of "it will kill us all" and "it will cause us all to lose our jobs", it will fundamentally change just the way we understand authenticity, accuracy, effort, sincerity and the nature of humanity. For me, the talk’s most profound insight is that AI’s impact will be heavily shaped by the infrastructure that we have in place. In the absense of that infrastructure actively being conceived and constructed, the consequences will likely default in a way severely to our detriment, e.g. universal surveillence etc, in the absense of societal trust. Consequently, the imperative for AI researchers is specific: to shift toward designing the necessary technical infrastructure specifically to shape our future.