We’re all getting tired of hearing about how incredibly wonderful — or how utterly apocalyptical –the AI future is going to be. We have heard similarly extravagant predictions about new technologies in the past, but the reality has always turned out to be a mixture of good and bad, at once exciting and terrifying.
My own crystal ball for AI shows a murkily psychedelic mix, but I believe my predictions — and everyone else’s — are essentially worthless. I don’t believe I (or anyone) can know what’s coming well enough to credibly defend either optimism or pessimism. But it doesn’t matter if our predictions are right or wrong. There are much more important and productive things for us to think about. Instead of optimistic or pessimistic, we can and should be guardedly hopeful, and hopefully diligent.
Let’s start with the obvious: Like it or not, AI is not going away. No technology ever has. Over a century of work on AI preceded even my own obsession with it in the 1970s, and the train is speeding up, not slowing down. If all of the governments of the world united to stop it, eventually some criminally-funded rogue scientists would build AI for the worst reasons imaginable. The genie will not return to the bottle. Resisting data centers is one of many ways we can try to slow it down, but slowdowns will ultimately be pointless if we don’t use the time we gain for serious longer term thought and planning.
The memes predicting utopia or extinction represent extremes that are probably possible, but they oversimplify and distract us from much more important questions. When can we trust AIs, and for what kinds of things? How will we distribute wealth if material scarcity is no longer an issue and human labor much less needed? Who is responsible for the mistakes that AIs make? Should we view AIs as tools, slaves, or peers? And what does AI mean for the human journey?
Life is strange beyond prediction. None of us can know enough about the future to justify giving up hope that it will be better. I know from my personal experience that, at the worst moment in your life, the future that awaits you might be better than you could ever imagine. As long as a positive future can be imagined, there’s no rational justification for giving up hope. More important, the act of hoping forces one to imagine a positive future, and our best hope is to collectively imagine a positive future clearly enough to work toward. together
There are huge challenges coming, and they will require major changes. For my part, I believe that we are entering a post-scarcity era for which our entire economic system will need to change. I envision that a universal basic income, providing a floor for everyone, could be coupled with libertarian reforms eliminating many regulations and programs that would no longer be needed. If everyone had a basic income, I don’t believe we’d need welfare, minimum wage, copyright, or a number of other artifacts of the age of scarcity.
Changes on this scale are frightening and hard for many people to imagine. But the truth is that AI’s potential for good won’t just magically bring about a golden era. It can, however, do so if we envision what is possible and create a movement to bring it about. Failing that, AI will be used to do whatever the billionaires want, which doesn’t make me optimistic. There’s certainly no guarantee that if we all work together we’ll get the world we want, but we’re far less likely to get it if we don’t.
We have to be hopeful enough to invest the time necessary to reach a rough consensus on where we want AI to go. Our best hope for using AI to build a better world is hope itself.
Leave a Reply