AI is going to save us. AI is going to enslave us. AI is going to destroy humanity and replace us.
Sure, AI might ultimately lead to one of those three basic scenarios. I hope the first one but then I’ve never been accused of being an optimist nor am I certain what, exactly, we’re being saved from. Oppression? War? Extinction? Ourselves?
Either way, AI isn’t the enemy. AI is a technology and like any technology can be used to create or destroy, to expand individual freedom or shrink it through subjugation. AI in and of itself, however, does not do any of this. Humans using technology do this to one another both individually and collectively as groups. Those groups became tribes and those tribes eventually grew to become nations all inventing, sharing, and using technology to build civilization and to destroy one another too.
This is the role technology has played in human culture since Homo sapiens first emerged on the scene some 300,000 years ago. Everything we’ve ever achieved as a species is tightly connected to the development and use of technology. AI is just the latest technology in a long line of technologies that have propelled humans to the top of the food chain in all of our glory and folly.
Against this backdrop of technology’s central role in the arc of the human story, AI feels a bit different from past technologies like fire, language, agriculture, trebuchets, ships, airplanes, nuclear weapons, rockets, and satellites. It feels different because it can do things that, until very recently, have been uniquely human.
A gun can’t write a poem and a submarine can’t answer complex estate tax questions. Prior to AI, most technologies were very narrow in their application. That’s not to say that nuclear technology, for example, isn’t versatile in its application: it can be used to power a city as well as incinerate it beneath a looming mushroom cloud. The difference is the application of the technology and the intentions of the humans utilizing it.
Against this backdrop of technology’s central role in the arc of the human story, AI feels a bit different from past technologies like fire, language, agriculture, trebuchets, ships, airplanes, nuclear weapons, rockets, and satellites.
AI feels different to us because it can mimic us. AI can talk to us and provide answers to questions. It can read and write. It can create art and music. AI can help you plan your next European vacation. And yes, it can assist you with estate tax planning.
We are daily bombarded with news stories about AI. One of today’s headlines was “Will AI wipe out the first rung of the career ladder?”.
“Generative artificial intelligence,” the article read, “may eliminate the job you got with your diploma still in hand, say executives who offered grim assessments of the entry-level job market last week in multiple forums.”
But AI has already replaced jobs. This started decades ago in the early 2000s with automated customer support call centers using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and now Large Language Models (LLMs) that are the technology behind today’s generative-AI platforms. AI will indeed replace more jobs, especially those that are routine and can be efficiently and dependably automated using AI.
We’ve been here before. During the Industrial Revolution, manufacturing jobs traditionally done by manual human laborers were “wiped out” by machines. The term “Luddite”, which today is used to describe someone who is opposed to new technology, comes from that era. The Luddites were a group of English textile workers in the 19th century who vehemently opposed the use of automated machinery to produce textiles because it threatened their livelihood.
The Luddites waged war on the machines but the machines eventually won. Well, the machines themselves, as a technology, didn’t fight back. People who owned the machines did. The British government did too. So it wasn’t the machines that won, but one group of humans who wanted a technology that would drive the economy and culture in one direction defeating another group of humans who wanted it to remain as it was.
There have been and will continue to be many Luddite moments throughout modern history. AI is no exception. Currently, we have a group of people who want AI to proliferate, chief among them being the CEOs of various AI companies such as OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. They will be the biggest cheerleaders of AI not only because the survival of the companies they lead depend on broad adoption and use of the AI systems and tools they create but because they believe that AI will make the world a better place.
I’m not freaking out about AI anymore. It’s just another powerful technology in our emerging human story. We’ve been here before and will hopefully be here many times again in the future. But it’s not AI that will make the world a better place. Whether or not AI saves us, enslaves us, or destroys and replaces us, will be completely up to us.
And that does kind of freak me out.
