In middle school, I played on a football team that lost every game. Our coaches tried to keep our spirits high by reciting the proverb once heard on fields and courts across the country: It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. When it comes to the state of our democracy, Americans would do well to heed those words. That old saying may appear out of place in a democratic society obsessed with election outcomes and legislative victories. Too many politicians interpret a ballot box victory as a mandate to shove their party’s agenda down…

Just like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it turns out that the Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator franchise was a blueprint, not a work of science fiction. When Skynet, a network of computers created by the military contractor Cyberdyne Systems, gained self-awareness, panicky humans tried to deactivate it. The newly formed artificial intelligence (AI) identified “all humans as a threat”, “decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination” and launched a nuclear attack on every major city. Four decades on, fiction risks becoming fact. In the most chilling warning since the Szilárd petition of 1945 and the establishment…