The reaction to this week’s announcement that the US will sell advanced AI chips to China has revived an uneasy feeling I get from time to time. It’s the feeling that, though there is a wide spectrum of elite opinion about how we should handle AI, none of the opinions make sense. That’s a slight exaggeration. I can point to individual people whose views on AI seem well thought out. What I can’t point to is a sizable block of influential elites with such views—a faction that has much clout, or even gets much airtime. And it seems to me that the elites who do have influence are steering us toward a probably bad future.