This year, Dartmouth College will host the flagship conference “AI at 70: What Must Remain Human?” Oct. 29-31 in Hanover, New Hampshire.
The term “artificial intelligence” was first coined in 1956 at Dartmouth College. The college was also the first with a formal academic field dedicated to artificial intelligence. Seventy years of artificial intelligence development have passed, yet too many of the people responsible for governing this nation appear to have remained on the sidelines, watching the technology develop rather than preparing for the consequences of where it might lead.
In 2018, some members of Congress appeared to be struggling to understand the technology they were supposed to regulate. In 2026, the technology is no longer simply something appearing on a screen. Artificial intelligence requires enormous amounts of electricity, and in many places, water. It is reshaping communities and driving the construction of massive data centers.
AI isn’t 10 years old, it isn’t 20; its field is 70 years old. That makes me wonder how we arrived at a point where we are asking what to do about the infrastructure required to support it, only after that infrastructure has begun changing our communities and putting new demands on our resources. Perhaps this isn’t a new problem at all.
I can’t help but think back to the Industrial Revolution and the environmental cleanup efforts that came decades later. Human beings often seem like kids in a toy store. A new technology appears and we are thrilled. We eagerly pick it up, turn it over, push every button and discover everything it can do. We don’t necessarily stop to ask what happens when the toy breaks. Then the cracks begin to appear. Suddenly, we rush to repair them. Sometimes we discover the damage is much greater than we realized. Sometimes the toy can be repaired; sometimes it cannot.
Often, those elected to regulate the mass production of our latest technological “toys” don’t begin examining the dangers until consumers, workers or communities report that something has gone wrong. By then, we may already be trying to repair something that should have been designed differently in the first place.
The Industrial Revolution spread to North America and Western Europe from Great Britain by the early 1800s. It wasn’t until the late 1960s and early 1970s that broad institutional efforts began to systematically clean up and regulate the resulting damage to our earth, water and air. For almost two centuries, society prioritized unprecedented economic growth, ignoring the heavy toll of unregulated coal burning, untreated factory sewage and toxic waste dumping.
It is encouraging to recognize communities are waving the red flags of warning just 70 years in, instead of a century or two, even though some of those writing regulations for this new technology do not actually understand or grasp the consequences of the ecological damage. Citizens who have been politically divided are coming together for a common cause: Stop the ecological damage, review and regulate the infrastructure of AI data centers, and develop strict, independent oversight commissions.
We cannot create, use and enjoy AI technology but abandon the responsibility for what it becomes. We have created it; now we have to raise it. Humans are amazing, intelligent beings capable of developing new technologies for the betterment of humanity. But creating something does not relieve us of responsibility for what we have created.
Perhaps the answer to AI at 70, “What Must Remain Human?” is human oversight, human boundaries and human accountability.
Cheryl Leeds is a Cherokee Nation citizen, family historian, and community volunteer in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, with a Master of Arts in Communication Arts.