Last week at the Economic Club of New York, Ruth Porat, the president of Alphabet/Google, joined IBM C.E.O. Arvind Krishna to make the bull case for A.I.—and to swat away the concerns voiced by the technology’s growing ranks of critics. As you may have noticed recently, esteemed techworld commencement speakers—Eric Schmidt, Gloria Caulfield, and Scott Borchetta—have been practically booed off the stage when they bring up A.I. (Porat’s boss at Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, artfully minimized the topic during his address at Stanford, though some students walked out anyway.) And no wonder: As Gene Sperling, the former director of the National Economic Council, argued this week in the Financial Times, “A.I. enthusiasts need to lose the delusion that if working families could only comprehend the productivity gains, consumer conveniences, and potential medical breakthroughs that the technology may bring, they would get over their fear of losing their standard of living, meaningful work, and hopes for their children’s economic future. They won’t.”