How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI
By Verity Harding
(Princeton University Press, 288 pages, $22)
By James Pethokoukis
(Center Street, 336 pages, $18)
Society has long been fascinated and terrified by the idea of artificial intelligence. Our belief that we can deploy AI to execute tasks previously performed by humans coexists with our fear that this Brave New World may self-destruct or fall under the control of evil-doers.
While we appreciate AI’s role in automating manufacturing, correcting our grammar, and generating backgrounds for Zoom calls, we grow squeamish when it starts creating original intellectual content. Our discomfort deepens when we hear that AI has infiltrated virtually every profession, including law, medicine, and journalism. Despite recognizing the technology’s time-saving benefits, we are fearful that we will be automated out of our jobs.
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Furthermore, we are worried about both excessive and inefficient government regulation — as well as the political persuasions of those controlling the regulations and manipulating the technology. With a highly divisive U.S. presidential election in full swing, fears persist that either party might attempt to use AI to steal the election or propagate a narrative that the election was stolen.
Society is craving guidance to mitigate our reservations about AI and to unleash its potential to better our lives. Two books provide valuable insights in this regard.
In AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI’s Future and Save Our Own, Verity Harding, the director of the AI & Geopolitics Project at Cambridge University, recommends that we look to history for solutions. Harding, whose career included a stint at Google, believes we should apply lessons from past innovations, including the atomic bomb, the space race, and the internet to develop policies and protocols for artificial intelligence.
In The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, James Pethokoukis, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, champions AI’s potential to drive the development of technologies that will enhance our overall quality of life. The book exudes enthusiasm for the potential of artificial intelligence to turn once-imagined science fiction wonders into reality.
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Though Harding and Pethokoukis differ in their political views, they are united in their belief that AI will enhance the quality of human life. They also both emphasize the need to establish guardrails around AI. Moreover, they concur that AI is suffering from a public relations problem and that the industry must improve its efforts to communicate AI’s benefits to the public.
Harding believes that AI has infinite potential to improve our lives. To demonstrate this, she fills her book with examples across different industries, including banks’ usage of AI to improve online fraud detection systems and the United Nations’ usage of AI to synthesize and summarize hearings. She additionally champions AI’s ability to accelerate medical diagnosis and treatment through the automated analysis of retinal scans, mammograms, and other radiological tests.
However, Harding asserts that AI is challenged by the technology industry’s closed-door mentality and argues that consumer input should have a greater role. “[W]hat innovators can do,” she says, “is listen to how that technology is making people feel, the effects it is having, and respond to them.”
She believes that today’s AI industry mirrors the internet’s state in the 1990s. This is especially the case insofar as AI is “at the mercy of differing, overlapping factions and interests,” including academics, activists, governments, and profit-motivated businesses. Harding believes lessons from the beginning of the internet can be extrapolated to establish a policy framework for AI.
For example, Harding asserts that, just like the internet, artificial intelligence requires a neutral, transparent third-party governing body. As a model for this, she suggests that we look to the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which has worked to create protocols for the internet’s Domain Name System, among other tasks. Harding describes ICANN as a “bridging institution” between the “traditional treaty-based organizations and the rapidity and the lawlessness of the internet.” She posits that ICANN’s neutral arbitrator role could serve as inspiration for a comparable entity that could serve as a go-between for artificial intelligence’s many stakeholders.
Pethokoukis’ The Conservative Futurist argues via a mélange of economic philosophy, historical and contemporary economic data, and popular culture references that we should embrace artificial intelligence rather than run from it. He addresses the widespread concern that artificial intelligence will eliminate jobs by pointing out that technological displacement has historically resulted in the creation of better jobs to replace those that are lost.
Pethokoukis cites the postwar period of 1948–1973 as the golden age for what he terms “Technologically Futuristic Productivity” (TFP), with 2.2 percent annual TFP. He maintains that the next TFP surge is within our grasp if we leverage our emerging technology and assume an “Up Wing” perspective. “Up Wing” and “Down Wing” are terms coined by futurist Fereidoun M. Esfandiary in the 1970s to differentiate between societal optimists and pessimists; up-wingers are innovative risk-takers while down-wingers are risk-averse doomsayers. Pethokoukis asserts that America is an Up Wing nation: “Without an ethos of anticipating a tomorrow better than today, it never would’ve grown from a country of 3 million people huddled on the Atlantic coastline of North America into a technological frontier-pushing, continent-sized, space-faring superpower of more than 330 million people.”
Like Harding, Pethokoukis believes that the public needs to be better educated about AI’s potential to make us healthier, wealthier, and wiser. To illustrate its positive impact, Pethokoukis cites a March 2023 Goldman Sachs study that predicted generative AI could increase U.S. productivity growth by just short of 1.5 percentage points over a decade, possibly driving annual GDP growth to as high as 4.5 percent.
In the 1960s, the public was excited about the space age, and Hollywood responded to that enthusiasm by producing entertainment that glorified future technology, including Star Trek, Lost in Space, and The Jetsons. Over the ensuing decades, Hollywood’s apocalyptic depiction of technology has become ubiquitous. Pethokoukis maintains that Hollywood needs to switch out its dark view of future tech with one that encourages us to envision a better world.
I highly recommend Verity Harding’s AI Needs You and James Pethokoukis’s The Conservative Futurist. Artificial intelligence has the capability to exponentially increase our economic prosperity, improve our quality of life, and transform our fantasies into reality. The genie is out of the bottle.
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