The Rise and Reckoning of AI | 2026 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate

Neil deGrasse Tyson moderates the 2026 Asimov Debate at the American Museum of Natural History, and the panel is built so the disciplines have to answer each other: Latanya Sweeney of Harvard on data privacy, Kate Crawford of USC on AI ethics and the material infrastructure underneath these systems, Chris Callison-Burch of Penn on natural language processing, Cynthia Rush of Columbia on statistical theory, Nate Soares of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute on long-term safety, and Eric Schmidt, formerly of Google, on national security and geopolitics.

Soares is the reason this one matters to the pacing argument. Six months before the September debate where he argued that control is not a solvable problem, he was making the same case on a stage where the other five panellists were describing harms that are already here — copyright, labour, fairness, privacy, surveillance. The Asimov format puts the existential claim next to the present-tense ones and makes each side account for the other, which is the collision the later coverage mostly staged one voice at a time.