I was reading Martin Fowler’s Fragments: May 14 this morning. I found this paragraph near the end both inspiring and frustrating.
I’m both a hoper and a doomer when it comes to our AI future. Fundamentally I see any powerful technology as a big bus: we are either on it, or get run over by it. I’m onboard the bus because I don’t think putting up some barriers would stop me being crushed by its wheels. Maybe if I’m on the bus I can join some people to influence the driver a bit. I’m also very reluctant to speculate on the future outcomes of anything, let alone something as powerful as this. Did the early industrialists in the late eighteenth century have any clue what the industrial revolution they unleashed would do? While it created many harms, it also created a massive rise in the living standards of millions of people, at least those whose countries were on the bus. AI may create benefits that I can’t really dream of, although I can glimpse it when it helps a friend stave off Parkinson’s disease.
There’s something poetic and beautiful about this. It’s also a point of view I generally agree with. There’s no way to know the future for anything, let alone a sufficiently complex piece of new technology. The good very well could outweigh the bad. We just don’t know yet, and I think it’s better to be influencing that direction. The trick is finding how to do that without being dismissive of the harms or other people’s concerns.
It’s this idea of being dismissive which is why this paragraph frustrates me. That bus analogy! Ugh. It’s basically the same idea as saying, “Get in on this, or get left behind!” Which is such an incredibly dismissive thing to say. It’s also not true.
No technology is inevitable. Technological outcomes are the results of many factors. Some of it is the usefulness of a technology, but it’s also many people making many different decisions. All of that adds up to an outcome. If someone’s decision is to sit out a given technology cycle, that’s a valid decision. If enough people do that, it will have an effect on that technology’s adoption. We’re already seeing this with the cultural backlash to AI. That backlash is already affecting the frontier AI labs’ strategy and approach.
I’m choosing to be part of cautiously and carefully using this technology. I want to find the good uses and also be a voice of reason against the hype and the fictional stories we tell ourselves about this technology. This bus analogy is one such story that needs push back. This tech isn’t inevitable. It might well be a central part of our lives like the internet—it could also be more like cloud computing than the iPhone—but either way, it will become what it does based on the choices we make together.