AI and the Coming Great Disruption of Everything

Nobody Knows What's in Store With The 'Smart' Machines

It appears that we now have another crisis to add to the polycrises that define our moment.  An ebbing pandemic with ongoing threats of new ones, war, climate catastrophe, historic economic inequality, mass migration, threats to democracy across the globe, and now artificial intelligence is crashing the party.  What had once been the stuff of science fiction is upon us with game-changing implications for everything from education and labor to creative production and the meaning of human existence itself.  

Tech innovators have historically liked to use the term “disruption” positively in a hip and edgy way to suggest that their tools are a vanguard creating a bold, more inventive new world out of the ashes of the old, stagnant status quo.  AI boosters are no different, but, when the full range of the potential impacts of this technology are considered, it’s not at all clear if this emerging creature is a bringer of wonderous, previously unimagined opportunities or a strange beast slouching toward dystopia.  

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the emergence of this latest phenomenon is that even the folks bringing it to us don’t know where we are headed.  On a recent 60 Minutes episode, the head of Google was a case in point.  As the Guardian  reported: 

• Google’s chief executive has said concerns about artificial intelligence keep him awake at night and that the technology can be “very harmful” if deployed wrongly.

• Sundar Pichai also called for a global regulatory framework for AI similar to the treaties used to regulate nuclear arms use, as he warned that the competition to produce advances in the technology could lead to concerns about safety being pushed aside . . . 

• Asked by the CBS journalist Scott Pelley why Google had released Bard publicly when he didn’t fully understand how it worked, Pichai replied: “Let me put it this way. I don’t think we fully understand how a human mind works either.”

• Pichai admitted that society did not appear to be ready for rapid advances in AI. He said there “seems to be a mismatch” between the pace at which society thinks and adapts to change compared with the pace at which AI was evolving.

The list of professionals and areas of social life that could be radically disrupted is too long to delve into deeply in the space of one column, but just looking to my own corner of the universe, education, there are some profound concerns.  

What does the ability to turn in AI generated writing and other forms of academic work do to learning?  What kinds of knowledge are we ready to turn over to AI to generate for us?  Why would we do this?  Why not?  We don’t have any answers to these questions, but the technology is already here and in use. 

What will this do to teachers and other knowledge workers in terms of employment in the future?  Some folks are already preparing to throw the majority of teachers into the dustbin of history.  Luis von Ahn, founder of Duolingo, told the New Yorker that: 

• Artificial intelligence would eventually make computers better teachers than people. He saw this as a positive development, since more people have access to smartphones than to high-quality education. “We’ve all gone to school,” he told me at one point. “Some teachers are good, but the vast majority are not all that great.” Humans, he told me on another occasion, “are just hard to deal with. You need a lot of human tutors, and they’re kind of hard to use, and we can’t get them for free. And I really want people to be able to learn for free.”

• Von Ahn’s own experience is, in many ways, a testament to human teaching—from the days of his early childhood, when his mother taught him multiple languages, to adolescence, when he developed lasting friendships with fellow-nerds, and even on to graduate school, where he met his adviser, Manuel Blum, whom he described to me as an inspiration. But he knows that his experience is rare. “I want the poor person in Guatemala to be able to learn with very high quality,” he said. “The only way I know how to do that is with A.I.”

Of course what von Ahn is doing here is dressing up a massively profitable power grab that would go a long way to recklessly destroying a noble profession as a social justice crusade despite the fact that he himself benefited from human teaching.  

Beyond the world of education, one need not have a Nobel Prize in Economics to understand that the jobs impact of AI would reach far beyond just education to a host of other knowledge sector intellectual or technical labor from journalism to a wide range of office work.  Thus, just as previous technological disruptions brutalized good working-class jobs, this one is very much a threat to millions of middle-class jobs.  There is also a huge potential impact on service sector work down the socioeconomic ladder and the potential for future massive unemployment for the losers in the AI derby.  

Of course, there are potential solutions like a guaranteed annual income, a radically shorter work week, and promises of new tech-assisted rather than eliminated employment, but when one releases such a transformative technology into a world of vast and entrenched economic inequality, it would be naïve to think that such visionary, humane responses would prevail rather than a meaner, Social Darwinist future where the lords of the new economy win big while many more of us suffer.  In sum, what could go wrong given the current trajectory of our society?

Finally, there is the bigger, philosophical question that comes when we start to confuse the efficiency of information processing and production with wisdom.  In such a reductionist view, human beings will never be able to compete with the machines they have created.  But the redefinition of humanity on terms dictated by machines is happening right now, as I type this column using a soon-to-be antiquated piece of technology.  

Ah, brave new world with such creatures in it.  

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Lead image: AI Graphic by DALL·E