The Indutrial Revolution and globalization were child’s play Danielle Allen was still at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study in 2008 when she raised red flags about anonymous viral emails attacking then-presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama. “I started thinking, ‘How does one stop it?’ ” Allen told the Washington Post: Allen set her sights on dissecting the modern version of a whisper campaign, even though experts told her it would be impossible to trace the chain e-mail to its origin. Along the way, even as her hunt grew cold, she gained valuable insight into the way political information circulates, mutates and sometimes devastates in the digital age. Now at Harvard, Allen is still warning about digital mayhem. Only now, her concern extends to “generative artificial intelligence, a tool that will help bad actors further accelerate the spread of misinformation.” She’s signed onto an open letter with technologists, academics, and others calling for a six-month pause in “the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.” Email spam was bad enough. A.I.-generated disinformation could be worse, with “all kinds of unpredictable emergent properties and powers” spawned by the technology. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates disagrees that we’re there yet, but Allen’s research suggests that the latest machine-learning models show “sparks” of artificial general intelligence. Microsoft Research teams concur (Washington Post): But regardless of which side of the debate one comes down on, and whether the time has indeed come (as I think it has) to figure out how to regulate an intelligence that…