“Programmed and linked together, they promise a future that is both sensational and frightening. Offices, shops and factories are already being made more productive in a way that will cost millions of jobs. Now the chips are down, what are we going to do about it? Must we accept the widespread unemployment to come? Can we survive if we don’t?” [1]
On Sunday’s I read the newspaper. A bona fide bundle of newsprint often as thick as a telephone book, the white pages at least, if you remember those. In the past three days, the NYT alone published no less than ten articles discussing A.I.
Words like “sensational” and “frightening” leap out. Technology chiefs invoke either run-away trains or cars that just needs brakes. And the old song “I Don’t Like Mondays” gets louder in my head, singing in 1979 “The silicon chip inside her head gets switched to overload.”
It’s all so familiar, how A.I. is fundamentally different from anything that’s come before, but the hysteria echoes. The quote above is from the BBC 2 program “Horizon” that aired in 1978. Living in England at the turn of 1980, the news, school assemblies and other mediums all trumpeted and warned about the changes coming because of silicon chips. A lot else was changing then, maybe part of that angst ended up fused onto the new technology.
A lot is changing today too, and everything moves so very much faster. A week or two after reading how A.I. must be regulated or it will kill us all, ads for classes on “How Not to use A.I.” pop up, and an M.D. writes how A.I. has made her a better physician, (though she fears it will make current med students worse ones.) For today I’ll choose to “just calm the F down” and see how this plays out. I’ve seen it before and the ‘pros’ outweighed the ‘cons’ in the end. Like fire and electricity before it, how we’ll use it determines what happens next.
[1] BBC 2 “Horizon.” “Now the Chips are Down.” First aired 31 March, 1978. https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/9d86b9d9acd846addced1578b0a1167f
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