Last November, a young African American man, Randal Quran Reid, was pulled over by the state police in Georgia as he was driving into Atlanta. He was arrested under warrants issued by Louisiana police for two cases of theft in New Orleans. Reid had never been to Louisiana, let alone New Orleans. His protestations came to nothing, and he was in jail for six days as his family frantically spent thousands of dollars hiring lawyers in both Georgia and Louisiana to try to free him.

It emerged that the arrest warrants had been based solely on a facial recognition match, though that was never mentioned in any police document; the warrants claimed “a credible source” had identified Reid as the culprit. The facial recognition match was incorrect, the case eventually fell apart and Reid was released.

He was lucky. He had the family and the resources to ferret out the truth. Millions of Americans would not have had such social and financial assets. Reid, though, is not the only victim of a false facial recognition match. The numbers are small, but so far all those arrested in the US after a false match have been black. Which is not surprising given that we know not only that the very design of facial recognition software makes it more difficult to correctly identify people of colour, but also that algorithms replicate the biases of the human world.

Reid’s case, and those of others like him, should be at the heart of one of the most urgent contemporary debates: that of artificial intelligence and the dangers it poses. That it is not, and that so few recognise it as significant, shows how warped has become the discussion of AI, and how it needs resetting. There has long been an undercurrent of fear of the kind of world AI might create. Recent developments have turbocharged that fear and inserted it into public discussion. The release last year of version 3.5 of ChatGPT, and of version 4 this March, created awe and panic: awe at the chatbot’s facility in mimicking human language and panic over the possibilities for fakery, from student essays to news reports.

Then, two weeks ago, leading members of the tech community, including Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, and Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, often seen as the godfathers of modern AI, went further. They released a statement claiming that AI could herald the end of humanity. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI,” they warned, “should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

If so many Silicon Valley honchos truly believe they are creating products as dangerous as they claim, why, one might wonder, do they continue spending billions of dollars building, developing and refining those products? It’s like a drug addict so dependent on his fix that he pleads for enforced rehab to wean him off the hard stuff. Parading their products as super-clever and super-powerful certainly helps massage the egos of tech entrepreneurs as well as boosting their bottom line. And yet AI is neither as clever nor as powerful as they would like us to believe. ChatGPT is supremely good at cutting and pasting text in a way that makes it seem almost human, but it has negligible understanding of the real world. It is, as one study put it, little more than a “stochastic parrot”.

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One day in the spring of 1954, J. Robert Oppenheimer ran into Albert Einstein outside their offices at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Oppenheimer had been the director of the institute since 1947 and Einstein a faculty member since he fled Germany in 1933. The two men might argue about quantum physics — Einstein grumbled that he just didn’t think that God played dice with the universe — but they were good friends.

Oppenheimer took the occasion to explain to Einstein that he was going to be absent from the institute for some weeks. He was being forced to defend himself in Washington, D.C., during a secret hearing against charges that he was a security risk, and perhaps even disloyal. Einstein argued that Oppenheimer “had no obligation to subject himself to the witch hunt, that he had served his country well, and that if this was the reward she [America] offered he should turn his back on her.” Oppenheimer demurred, saying he could not turn his back on America. “He loved America,” said Verna Hobson, his secretary who was a witness to the conversation, “and this love was as deep as his love of science.”

“Einstein doesn’t understand,” Oppenheimer told Ms. Hobson. But as Einstein walked back into his office he told his own assistant, nodding in the direction of Oppenheimer, “There goes a narr,” or fool.

Einstein was right. Oppenheimer was foolishly subjecting himself to a kangaroo court in which he was soon stripped of his security clearance and publicly humiliated. The charges were flimsy, but by a vote of 2 to 1 the security panel of the Atomic Energy Commission deemed Oppenheimer a loyal citizen who was nevertheless a security risk: “We find that Dr. Oppenheimer’s continuing conduct and association have reflected a serious disregard for the requirements of the security system.” The scientist would no longer be trusted with the nation’s secrets. Celebrated in 1945 as the “father of the atomic bomb,” nine years later he would become the chief celebrity victim of the McCarthyite maelstrom. Oppenheimer may have been naïve, but he was right to fight the charges — and right to use his influence as one of the country’s pre-eminent scientists to speak out against a nuclear arms race. In the months and years leading up to the security hearing, Oppenheimer had criticized the decision to build a “super” hydrogen bomb. Astonishingly, he had gone so far as to say that the Hiroshima bomb was used “against an essentially defeated enemy.” The atomic bomb, he warned, “is a weapon for aggressors, and the elements of surprise and terror are as intrinsic to it as are the fissionable nuclei.” These forthright dissents against the prevailing view of Washington’s national security establishment earned him powerful political enemies. That was precisely why he was being charged with disloyalty.

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We needn’t be shocked by America’s choice of friends. The enchanting folks that the U.S. government has cultivated as partners include the shah of Iran, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan, the Afghan mujahedeen, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, a series of tin-pot dictators in South Vietnam and Gen. Augusto Pinochet of Chile. A central tenet of U.S. foreign policy has, too often, been democracy for the United States, dictatorship for its (nonwhite) friends.

Mr. Modi certainly does not belong in that rogues’ gallery. India is bigger than him. It will see him off. The question is: When? And at what cost?

India is not a dictatorship, but neither is it still a democracy. Mr. Modi heads a majoritarian, Hindu-supremacist, electoral autocracy that is tightening its grip on one of the most diverse countries in the world. This makes election season, which is just around the corner, our most dangerous time. It’s murder season, lynching season, dog whistle season. The partner that the U.S. government is cultivating and empowering is one of the most dangerous people in the world — dangerous not as a person but as someone turning the world’s most populous country into a tinderbox.

What kind of democrat is a prime minister who almost never holds a news conference? It took all of the U.S. government’s powers of persuasion (such as they are) to coax Mr. Modi into addressing one while in Washington. He agreed to take two questions, only one of them from a U.S. journalist. Sabrina Siddiqui, The Wall Street Journal’s White House reporter, stood up to ask him what his government was doing to prevent discrimination against minorities, particularly Muslims. Given the worsening abuses against Muslims and Christians in his country, it’s a question that really ought to have been raised by the White House. But the Biden administration outsourced it to a journalist. In India, we held our breath.

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