Minimum Standards for Taking AI Seriously

Is AI going to revolutionize the world, upend the economy, and propel us into an unprecedented age of abundance, or, alternately, dystopia? Or is it all just a big bubble, a historic financial folly, a mania built on an overhyped fancy pattern-matching machine?

I do not know. But I can say confidently that the outcome of the AI era will be somewhere on the spectrum between the above options. The precise answer depends not only on technical matters of computing progress that I am not qualified to assess, but also on the chaotic swirl of global events that make the future difficult for anyone to predict. Partly because of this uncertainty—and also because of existing political tribalism, and also because of the history of Silicon Valley and Wall Street overhyping things for their own benefit, and also because of the nature of capitalism—the public discussion around how we should collectively prepare for our AI future has become polarized in an unhelpful way. On one side we have people who have a ton of money invested in AI saying “it will change everything” and on the other side we have people who hate those types of people saying “I doubt that, because you guys are greedy, untrustworthy liars with an enormous personal stake in getting everyone to believe the hype.”

Let me point out that both things can be true. A thick cloud of hustlers, grifters, and the greediest monsters on earth surround the AI industry like flies surround a butchered corpse. Sure. This has been true with all new technologies. At the same time, notwithstanding the great volume of bullshit issuing forth from this cloud of self-interested actors, the underlying technology itself—railroads, electricity, the internet, whatever—does often have profoundly transformative effects on the world. (Even if it takes longer and unfolds in a different way than the grifters said.) This, in fact, is the most likely path for AI. The good news is that, unless you are a tech investor or tech journalist or AI company engineer, the precise specifics of how and when every advance occurs and who wins the race to each specific benchmark and how much money they make off of it… do not really matter. What matters to the vast majority of people in America and around the world is: How will AI change the economy and the distribution of power