Melania Trump turned up at the White House on Thursday with a warning for all mankind.
“The robots are here,” she said. “Our future is no longer science fiction.”
It wasn’t exactly “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” but it was a fascinating sight nonetheless. This first lady does not come to Washington easily or often, but felt compelled to return to speak about the possibilities and dangers of artificial intelligence and the collective duty of our species.
“As leaders and parents, we must manage A.I.’s growth responsibly,” she said in her remarks. “During this primitive stage, it is our duty to treat A.I. as we would our own children — empowering, but with watchful guidance.”
She was sitting at the head of a round table that had been set up in the East Room. To her right sat Michael Kratsios, the administration’s tech czar. Also up there was David Sacks, the administration’s go-to guy on crypto and A.I. initiatives; a couple of cabinet secretaries; and the heads of Google and IBM.
Mrs. Trump wore an ecru-colored suit and looked out into an audience of dozens of tech types. Sam Altman, the boyish-looking chief executive of OpenAI, sat in the front row and listened as Mrs. Trump read from her binder.
“We are living in a moment of wonder,” she said, “and it is our responsibility to prepare America’s children.”
Mrs. Trump spoke from this room back in May when she unveiled a new postage stamp commemorating former first lady Barbara Bush. But that didn’t seem like a very Melania kind of event. It wasn’t glamorous and it definitely wasn’t cutting edge. And it turns out that this first lady is kind of a techno-futurist.
We only get flashes of her from time to time, but she has shown herself to be captivated by the wonders and horrors and opportunities of modern technologies, time and again.
She’s got her own memecoin (it’s called $MELANIA), and she generated headlines last year when she made the controversial decision to use artificial intelligence mimicking her own voice to narrate the audiobook version of her memoir (it’s also called “MELANIA”).
“Let the future of publishing begin,” she said at the time.
Her signature focus as first lady is all about digital. She successfully pushed a bill to protect women and children online from the spread of deepfake images and revenge porn and internet catfishing schemes. Last week, she launched a nationwide “Presidential Artificial intelligence Challenge,” inviting students and educators to visit AI.Gov. She brought Hayley Harrison, her chief of staff and most trusted confidante, to the round table, and appointed her to the White House’s task force on A.I.
And so, a portrait emerges of an inscrutable first lady whose remarks Thursday sounded like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel.
“Cars now steer themselves through our cities, robots hold steady hands in the operating room, and drones are redefining the future of war,” she said. She talked about “first-generation humanoids.”
It made for quite the juxtaposition to how her husband had talked about the future of artificial intelligence just two days earlier. On Tuesday, he was holding forth in the Oval Office when a reporter asked him about a viral video that appeared to show bags being thrown out of windows of the White House residence.
“That’s probably A.I. generated,” Mr. Trump said of the video. He explained that it had to be a fake video because those windows in the White House don’t open so easily. “In fact, my wife was complaining about it the other day,” he said. “She said, ‘I’d love to have a little fresh air come in,’ but you can’t — they’re bulletproof.”
Actually, earlier that day, the White House press office had confirmed in a statement that the video was real but that nothing untoward had occurred; it was merely “a contractor who was doing regular maintenance while the president was gone.”
Still, the subject of the mysterious video had piqued the president’s interest in artificial intelligence.
“One of the problems we have with A.I.: It’s both good and bad,” he mused. “If something happens really bad, just blame A.I. But also, they create things, it works both ways.”
A new thought occurred to him just then: “If something happens that’s really bad, maybe I’ll just have to blame A.I..” This notion seemed exactly the sort of thing his wife would soon warn about from the White House. (“We must manage A.I.’s growth responsibly.”)
Mr. Trump also mentioned a different video he’d seen and was haunted by. This one sounded like it was definitely generated by A.I. As he described it, the video showed him evolving from the baby he once was into the man he is today.
“It’s a little bit scary, to be honest with you,” he said.
As his wife said Thursday: “Our future is no longer science fiction.”
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
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