AI backlash ignores the history of invention
by Michael McKenna · The Washington TimesOPINION:
I am pretty sure the first person who concluded that it was much easier to build fences around the animals they wanted to eat rather than go through all the trouble of stalking and killing their dinner in the wild was attacked by friends and neighbors concerned with the effect of the new approach on those who relied on the hunting economy.
Similarly, the advent of the automobile caused anxiety among those who made a living from raising, training and selling or renting horses.
Needless to say, the intervening 150 or so years have shown that a world in which there are cars and trucks — and eventually airplanes — is not only a world in which vastly more people are employed in transportation and its cognates but is also a world in which those of average means have the ability to travel more or less at their discretion.
That privilege had previously been limited to those of means, to those who could afford to own and keep horses (and the land on which those horses lived).
This is, of course, relevant to our immediate and now national discussion over the wisdom of artificial intelligence and its physical manifestation in data centers.
As we now know, there are small pockets of the nation in which, for whatever reasons, the citizenry would rather pretend that AI is not coming to change their lives, that if they ignore the future, it will go away.
They rightly point out that, in addition to the very real concern that humanity will continue to fade into the shadow of the machine, the widespread use of AI will result in disparities in wealth and opportunity.
Those are reasonable concerns. The history of progress is characterized by exactly the sort of disparities people worry about, and there is no reason to believe this instance will be any different. The simple reality is that those who climb and control the commanding heights of the new economy are liable to be rich and powerful, and probably very rich and very powerful.
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Certainly, that has been true in the wake of every invention or innovation, from the domestication of animals through to steam engines and railroads, and right up to the creation of the internet. There is no reason to believe it won’t happen again.
That said, however, who really cares whether other people get rich in the wake of a technological advance? The real question is whether we will all be better off because of advances in technology.
In this, history gives us ample guidance. Farming. Domestication of animals. Iron. Ships. Tools of all kinds. Weapons. Moveable type. Steam engines. Railroads. Paved roads. Electricity. Radio. Vaccines. Television. Computers. As a practical matter, the list is nearly endless.
Each in turn has been the subject of concerns about its safety, about its wisdom, about its effect on the character of human beings, about who stood to become rich and powerful and who would likely lose.
Every innovation you can think of was subject to the same sort of scrutiny and concern as the sort now being directed toward AI. In turn, each of those advancements in human knowledge and understanding — however they started and whoever became rich and powerful as a result of their creation — made life better for all of us. If they had not, then they would not have been adopted.
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Let me close with a thought from James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute, who is rapidly becoming the voice of reason on AI. Mr. Pethokoukis notes that there are some pretty aggressive predictions about how much damage AI could do to employment numbers (“Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warns AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs over the next five years”). Yet when you look at the economic forecasts from the financial services firms, you do not see any of that reflected in their estimates.
His conclusion? “My back-of-the-envelope estimate is that this isn’t a world of 30% unemployment. It’s a world where AI shows up as a productivity tailwind deep in a Wall Street research note, not as a job market rupture that dominates headlines.”
Hardly the stuff of apocalyptic visions, but probably more in line with the incremental, careful world in which we live, and certainly more in line with the trajectory of other innovations that sometimes took a generation or two to really affect things.
In short, worry less about AI. It will take some time to get here, and when it does, it will be a good thing.
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• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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