Wrong HANDS: Two Fears About Artificial Intelligence and Why We May Be Watching the One

Everyone agrees artificial intelligence is dangerous in the wrong hands. Nobody agrees on whose hands those are.For a decade, Washington's loudest fear has been geopolitical: that China is racing ahead in AI, and that losing this race would be catastrophic. That fear has shaped chip export controls, defense budgets, and a decade of campaign rhetoric. But a quieter fear has been building alongside it - that AI is already concentrated in the hands of a handful of unaccountable companies, billionaires, and institutions, regardless of what flag they fly.Wrong Hands puts both fears on trial. It traces the history of American "race" panics from Sputnik to the 1980s semiconductor scare to today's chip war with Beijing. It follows the money behind both narratives, asking who profits when one fear crowds out the other. And it asks the question neither side wants to answer: what if the real danger isn't which country wins, but that no one - in Washington, Silicon Valley, or Beijing - is being held accountable at all?Balanced, rigorously argued, and unwilling to hand you an easy villain, Wrong Hands is the book for anyone trying to think clearly about artificial intelligence in an age of manufactured certainty.