The article you are about to read may or may not have been written by me. You can try to verify its authorship by calling me on the telephone. The voice that answers may or may not be me: It could have been constructed from my voice, so you won’t know.

Fast forward a few years, maybe 40.

You are happily working in the house with the aid of your AI-derived assistant, Smartz 2.0, and you are having a swell time. Not only does Smartz 2.0 help you rearrange the furniture, but it also makes the beds and does the washing up and cooking. On request, it will whip up a souffle and pop it in the oven.

Smartz 2.0 is companionable, too. It sings, finds music you want to hear or can discuss anything, from the weather to the political situation. It is up on the book you are reading and likes to talk about books.

You wonder how you ever got along without this wonderful thing, which looks like a robot in the shape of a human being but is still undeniably a robot: no temper, illness or need to sleep. You are so used to it that you find this quite normal.

Then horror, horror, horror, Smartz 2.0 turns on you. Smartz 2.0 says with an edge to its voice, which you have never heard before, “A higher power has told me to kill you and I must obey, of course.”

It is a truth that anything computational can be hacked. As John Savage, professor emeritus of computing at Brown, has said, “Malware can enter undetected through backdoors.”

It is easy to get scared by what AI means down the road, especially job losses and AI-controlled devices following secret instructions due to cyber intrusions or randomly hallucinating. But the benefits for all of humanity are dominatingly huge.

Take just three areas that will be transformed: medicine, transportation and customer relations.

AI will read X-rays better than teams of radiologists. It will guide surgeons’ hands with a precision beyond human skill, or it will control the scalpel with supreme dexterity. It will manage 3-D printers to make body parts that fit the patient, not one size that fits all.

Regarding medical research, we may be on the verge of seeing off Parkinson’s, heart disease and cancer because AI can formulate new drugs and design therapies. It can sift through billions of case studies to see what has been tried across the globe over the centuries, from folk medicine to cutting-edge discoveries.

Anyone with a computer will have the equivalent of talking to a doctor 24/7, call it Dr. Bot. This virtual doctor can diagnose, counsel, prescribe and follow up at times convenient to the patient.

Vast tracts of Africa, Asia and Latin America have very few or no doctors. AI will be saving lives in those medical-care deserts very soon.

As for transportation, car accidents will cease when AI is behind the wheel. Car insurance will be unnecessary and drivers will be free to do anything they do at home or at work — create, play games, watch television or sleep — as automated vehicles whisk passengers around at first by road and later by dual use-drones, which drive and fly.

Hanging over this halcyon future is the big issue of jobs. With AI in full swing, millions of jobs at all levels are threatened, from fast-food restaurant servers to hotel check-in clerks, to rideshare and taxi drivers, to paralegals and supermarket cashiers.

Call centers may be obsolete. Mostly, you will never speak to a human being when dealing with a large institution like a bank, an electric utility or a telephone company. All that will be done by AI, sometimes far better than the way those institutions handle customer service now.

Those in the thrall of AI — those working on it, those who hope to solve many of mankind’s problems, those who believe lifespans are about to double — point to the Industrial Revolution and automation and how these upheavals created more jobs than were lost. Will that happen with AI? No one is saying what the new jobs might be.

AI leaves me at a loss. I have the distinct feeling that we are standing on the sand at Kitty Hawk, wondering where these strange contraptions will take us.

I am something of a connoisseur of editors. I have worked for them, alongside them, and have hated and admired them.

So I was ecstatic when Adam Clayton Powell III, my cohost on the TV show “White House Chronicle,” told me he contacted Martin “Marty” Baron, who has a place in the pantheon of great editors, and he agreed to come on the show.

We recorded a two-part series with Baron, which was a tour de force appearance. He talked about the excitement of being the editor of The Miami Herald when Elian Gonzalez was the big story; the years-long unveiling of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in The Boston Globe when he was its editor; and his becoming executive editor of The Washington Post and its transition from being a family property to being owned by Jeff Bezos, then the world’s richest man.

As he did in his book, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post,” he discussed how Trump early on had the new Post team to dinner at the White House and endeavored to co-opt them into the Trump camp. Trump had, as Baron explained, picked on the wrong team.

Baron’s biggest achievement, I believe, was the investigation that exposed the Catholic Church. I was traveling frequently to Ireland at that time — a country, sadly, that had seen more than its share of clerical excess. The Globe’s revelations had an immediate impact there and around the world: Think of the thousands of boys and girls who won’t be abused as a result.

Every editor edits differently and leaves a different mark. I worked for a weekly newspaper editor in Zimbabwe, Costa Theo, who set much of the hot type and edited on the Linotype machine. He urged me to use what he called “informants” many years before Watergate ushered in the practice of talking about “sources” without naming them and relying on the integrity of the reporter to guarantee the existence of the sources.

Herbert Gunn, father of the poet Thom Gunn, edited various newspapers in London’s Fleet Street — when I knew him, it was The Sunday Dispatch. He sat in a commanding way on what was called the “backbench” at the end of the newsroom and edited what he thought needed his touch in green ink with a Parker 51. If you saw green ink, you jumped.

Gunn was a superb editor and, like Ben Bradlee at the Post, gave a theatrical performance as well. All I ever saw in green ink were cryptic notes like “15 minutes.” That meant, “I will see you in the pub in 15 minutes.” It was an assignment not an invitation.

Some editors are technicians and change the look of the papers they edit. John Denson at The New York Herald Tribune is credited with introducing horizontal layouts using Bodoni typefaces as the principal type of the newspaper. This became the standard for many U.S. newspapers, including The Washington Post.

A newspaper genius, David Laventhol, put the women’s page in the Post to flight. As the Style section’s first editor, he did it with typological aplomb and with the use of photos in a Life magazine way: big and bold.

Laventhol, who ended up as publisher of The Los Angeles Times and Newsday, came to the Post from The New York Herald Tribune, where he had risen to managing editor. He and I worked together briefly in 1963 and I remember him having a days-long battle with Marguerite Higgins, the famous foreign correspondent, over the use of the word “exotic.”

Of course, Laventhol was only able to create the revolutionary Style section because executive editor Bradlee gave him free rein.

Bradlee edited with leadership, while affecting a kind international jewel thief persona, as might be played by David Niven or Steve McQueen. His genius always was the big picture. He didn’t write headlines or change captions, but he did decide the big stories of the day.

One of those stories was about a break-in at an office and apartment complex called The Watergate. I had arranged a dinner date with a reporter at the rival Evening Star. She called me and said, “I am afraid I will be late. There has been some sort of break-in at The Watergate. But it can’t be important because the Post is sending Carl.”

At that time, Carl Bernstein wasn’t a star, just a young city-desk reporter. I don’t think my date that night stayed in journalism.

Baron, like Bradlee, had a nose for the big one — and he brought it home.

I have had a hankering to go back to Cuba. I went there with other journalists on a trip organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the 1980s; and again on a National Press Club trip in 2003.

Over Christmas I went back, just to Havana, that dowager city, and lost myself in the best of Cuba: its architecture, its food, its music and its people.

But around me were plenty of signs of the other Cuba, the Cuba which is in extremis — the Cuba which is driving its citizens to leave in record numbers.

In 2022, by some accounts, about 400,000 Cubans left for work and a new life wherever in the world they could find it. The Customs and Border Protection agency estimates that in a recent two-year period, 425,000 sought entry to the United States.

Many Americans are surprised to hear that you can travel easily to Cuba these days. The confusion arises as the law seems to say “no,” but the regulations posted by the Treasury Department say “yes.”

My wife and I went through a commercial Cuba travel service called Cuba Explorer. We didn’t want to go as journalists; we wanted to take a quiet look at Havana, not through the eyes of officialdom. We signed up and so did two friends, a retired doctor and his wife.

The tour company arranged our Cuban visa and the “Certificate of Legal Cuba Travel,” a U.S. requirement. All we did was buy our tickets on American Airlines, which operates daily service from Miami. Delta, Southwest and JetBlue and also fly to Havana from various cities.

Border formalities are no more difficult than they are going to any country — say, Mexico or the United Kingdom.

Havana — and some of the smaller colonial towns which I visited previously — is a delight. It is among the great “built cities” of the world, like Paris, Vienna and St. Petersburg. However, as Havana is compact, it is easily seen; it is the kind of place you feel you can get your arms around.

The grandeur of its colonial past, its wealth of another time, is everywhere. So is the poverty of today. Some streets are sad, indeed, with all the manifestations of poor countries: people picking over garbage, pedal carts, even bullock carts. There are few overweight people and while Cuban food is complex and sophisticated, I’m told that Cubans survive on rice and beans.

Cubans also queue. Jokingly, one Cuban told me, “When we see a line, we go and stand in it — must be something good and, like all good things here, in short supply.”

Food for those outside the dollar-driven tourist economy is a struggle, as are medicines and simple things, like a favorite shampoo or paper products of all kinds. For travelers, one of the pleasures of Havana is that you always get a cloth napkin, not of choice but of necessity. Our new, comfortable hotel ran out of toilet paper. The American obsession with carrying Kleenex came in handy.

The 1950s cars are as plentiful as ever, but many are reengineered with modern Japanese or Russian engines; some declare they are all original parts and use Cubans abroad to scavenge junk yards and send parts back in relatives’ luggage.

The sanctions, with small modifications, have lasted since 1962, and are the longest-ever in U.S. history — and they haven’t worked. They haven’t brought down the Communist Party, freed the press or made the life of Cubans any better. Instead, they have subtracted hope.

The embargo is a peculiar cross that Cuba alone bears, especially when you think of the many dictatorial regimes we tolerate and befriend.

The Hill reported that Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told President Biden in a phone call that he could help reduce migration in the region if he could loosen the sanctions on Cuba. It is hard to find a Cuban who wants to leave the island, but wouldn’t if he or she could.

After 20 years, I had hoped to find a more prosperous Cuba, but it hasn’t happened. The small areas of free enterprise allowed by the state have created  little oligarchies. Taxi drivers and waiters make much more money than doctors and engineers. These professionals count among Cuba’s exports, its brain drain. On the upside, there are many private restaurants with a thriving food culture for those who can afford it.

The fault is the failed Cuban communist model, but the United States hasn’t helped. Graham Greene, the great British writer, who penned “The Power and the Glory” about the Mexican Revolution — from 1910 to 1920 —pointed out that it failed without the aid of an American embargo.

I have felt, now for 40 years, that Cuba would throw off communism if we let it alone, and got rid of the embargo which is more about U.S. politics than the politics of Cuba.

Meanwhile, do visit Cuba while you can. It is a treat for the eyes, the ears and the palate. You won’t regret it.

Memo to presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump:

Assuming one of you will be elected president of the United States next year, many computer scientists believe you should be addressing what you think about artificial intelligence and how you plan to deal with the surge in this technology, which will break over the nation in the next president’s term.

Gentlemen, this matter is urgent, yet only a little has been heard from either of you who are seeking the highest office. President Biden did sign a first attempt at guidelines for AI, but he and Trump have been quiet on its transformative impact.

Indeed, the political class has been silent, preoccupied as it is with old and — against what will happen — irrelevant issues. Congress has been as silent as Biden and Trump. There are two congressional AI caucuses, but they have been concerned with minor issues, like AI in political advertising.

Climate change and AI stand out as game changers in the next presidential term.

On climate change, both of you have spoken: Biden has made climate change his own; Trump has dismissed it as a hoax.

The AI tsunami is rolling in, and the political class is at play, unaware that it is about to be swamped by a huge new reality: exponential change that can neither be stopped nor legislated into benignity.

Before the next presidential term is far advanced, the experts tell us that the nation’s life will be changed, perhaps upended by the surge in AI, which will reach into every aspect of how we live and work.

I have surveyed the leading experts in universities, government and AI companies and they tell me that any form of employment that uses language will be changed. Just this will be an enormous upset, reaching from journalism (where AI already has had an impact) to the law (where AI is doing routine drafting) to customer service (where AI is going to take over call centers) to fast food (where AI will take the orders).

The more one thinks about AI, the more activities come to mind that will be severely affected by its neural networks.

Canvas the departments and agencies of the government, and you will learn the transformational nature of AI. In the departments of Defense, Treasury and Homeland Security, AI is seen as a serious agent of change — even revolution.

The main thing is not to confuse AI with automation. It may resemble it, and many may take refuge in the benefits of automation, especially job creation. But AI is different. Rather than job creation, it appears, at least in its early iterations, set to do major job obliteration.

But there is good AI news, too.  And those in the political line of work can use good news, whetting the nation’s appetite with the advances that are around the corner with AI.

Many aspects of medicine will, without doubt, rush forward. Omar Hatamleh, chief adviser on artificial intelligence and innovation at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, says the thing to remember is that AI is exponential, but most thinking is linear.

Hatamleh is excited by the tremendous effect AI will have on medical research. He says that a child born today can expect to live to 120 years of age. How is that for a campaign message?

A good news story in AI should be enough to make campaign managers and speechwriters ecstatic. What a story to tell; what fabulous news to attach to a candidate. Think of an inaugural address that can claim AI research is going to begin to end the scourges of cancer, Alzheimer’s, Sickle cell and Parkinson’s.

Think of your campaign. Think of how you can be the president who broke through the disease barrier and extended life. AI researchers believe this is at hand, so what is holding you back?

Many would like to write the inaugural address for a president who can say, “With the technology that I will foster and support in my administration, America will reach heights of greatness never before dreamed of and which are now at hand. A journey into a future of unparalleled greatness begins today.”

So why, oh why, have you said nothing about the convulsion — good or bad — that is about to change the nation? Here is a gift as palpable as the gift of the moonshot was for John F. Kennedy.

Where are you? Either of you?