AI, Fear, and Why We've Been Here Before

It seems like every day the growing hysteria over the potential of AI to negatively affect our lives reaches a new level. Politicians and, sadly, even the AI business sector itself, are irresponsibly fueling the fire. Perhaps we could think about this in historical context.

I am not a tech person. I don't code. I can barely operate my television. But I am a student of history and history teaches us that there is no value in fearing or trying to impede the relentless march of technology in our universe. The reason is simple: we have been here before. Many times. Each time was met with fear and resistance, and each time technology prevailed and our worst fears did not.

This development may be bigger, it may be faster, but it does not have to be different.

This is a 6-minute read. For a quick outline, click here.

The big arc of history

Human history is a history of technological advancement and change. I’m quite sure our hunter-gatherer ancestors liked their lives. After all, they did it for two million years. Although life was not easy, it was simple; they lived in small groups, moved with the seasons, required no government, and enjoyed an economic equality not known since.

Then, roughly 10,000 years ago, some daring soul planted a seed, watered it, and watched it grow into something he could eat. Surely the resultant agricultural revolution did not feel like progress to everyone. It meant staying put, backbreaking work in fields, entirely new social structures, new hierarchies, and the first tensions between the rich and the poor.

The skills needed to hunt and gather became antiquated and gave way to farming - an entirely different skill. Despite that, over a few thousand years, virtually the entire population of the world made the transition.

By the time the U.S. was founded, 90 percent of Americans were farmers. Today, fewer than 2 percent of American workers are employed in agriculture and ranching. Thanks to technology, we grow more food than ever; we just do it with far fewer people. Somehow along the way, 88 percent of the population transitioned to another way of life. How did that happen?

The answer to that is the Industrial Revolution. Beginning in the early 19th century, the 88% started a massive migration to become factory and office workers, teachers, engineers, programmers, and now baristas. These were jobs no farmer in 1790 could have imagined. It replaced hand production with machines, cottage industries with factories, and artisan skill with assembly lines. It was, until now, the most disruptive economic transformation in the history of the modern world and it happened at breakneck speed compared to the prior revolution. It terrified people for good reason. And yet here we are, and no one, I assume, would choose to go back.

The transition wasn’t always easy

Resistance, sometimes violent, wasn’t uncommon. In the early 1800s, bands of English textile workers called the Luddites went on a campaign of industrial sabotage, smashing mechanical looms and stocking frames across England. They were skilled craftsmen whose livelihoods were threatened by machines. It took 12,000 British troops to quiet them down.

The invention of the spinning jenny put seven out of eight spinners out of business. Threatened spinners broke into the inventor’s house and destroyed his machines in protest.

The printing press provoked a similar panic. Critics warned that printers were flooding the market with dangerous content at prices that put books within reach of everyone, including young women. The printing press did not destroy the scribes' world - it created publishing, journalism, universal literacy, and eventually the Enlightenment.

The arrival of electricity and the assembly line in the early twentieth century set off another round of displacement and fear. Skilled tradesmen saw their expertise devalued. Rural workers flooded into cities for factory work. The nature of the American economy shifted so fast that it generated the labor movement, progressive-era reforms, and a generation of political upheaval.

The jobs of the future are always unimaginable

Here is the thing that never changes: no one in the middle of a technological revolution likes it or can see what comes next. No one.

In 1900, no one predicted the automobile mechanic. In 1950, no one predicted the computer programmer. In 1990, no one predicted the app developer, the social media manager, the data scientist, the cybersecurity analyst, or the podcast producer. These are not marginal occupations. Millions of Americans hold them today, and they did not exist as categories a generation ago.

So far, every wave of automation has eliminated certain tasks and created new categories of work. The eliminated tasks were visible, immediate, and often painful. The new categories are invisible until they appear. Fear focuses on the first. History is made by the second.

Although history is littered with opportunistic politicians who sell the public on the restoration of the idyllic “good old days”, there is no going back. So why resist going forward?

AI is different and the same

I am not oblivious to the reality that AI is genuinely unprecedented in the speed and magnitude of the change it represents. Why shouldn’t it be? That has been the reality of every significant technological change since the beginning of time. Agricultural displacement played out over generations. Industrial displacement played out over decades. AI displacement may play out over years.

I also recognize that it doesn’t just impact manual labor and routine clerical work; it also affects cognitive tasks - the kind of work that, for the past century, only humans were able to do. This makes the disruption broader and faster than previous waves. The potential impact is real.

But the underlying dynamic has not changed. The productivity gains AI generates will flow through the economy. We will all benefit from higher output, lower costs, and new categories of human activity - from early detection of cancer to safer cars, more productive agriculture, cleaner energy, and applications we can’t yet name.

The question is whether the transition is managed well or badly, not whether it happens.

How should we react?

While the policy response deserves greater attention at another time, suffice here to say that the countries that thrive will be the ones that treat adaptation as a serious national project to run to, not from.

This means having a serious public policy debate about how to harness AI and benefit from it. What is the role for government in regulating it? What are the national security implications?  How do we use it for our national defense before others use it against us?

How do we reform education to emphasize judgment, creativity, and the ability to supervise AI systems rather than compete with them? How do we build workforce retraining pathways for people of all ages and disciplines? And ultimately, it may mean some public assistance to make that transition affordable.

Back to the lesson of history

Every generation that lived through a major technological transition had people who believed the change was too big, too fast, and fundamentally different from anything that had come before. Every one of them was partly right. Every one of them was ultimately wrong about the conclusion.

AI will eliminate tasks, but it will not eliminate the human need to work, to create, to solve, and to imagine. The jobs of the AI economy are being invented right now, in garages and labs and dorm rooms, by people who have no idea they are inventing them. In 30 years, our grandchildren will explain to their children what those jobs are, and the children will find them as obvious as we find the software engineer or the podcast producer today.

This is a pro-growth opportunity and we should seize it. The potential productivity gains from AI have the potential to dramatically reverse the growing affordability problem Americans are facing in the areas of housing, healthcare, and food. Our political leadership needs to see the future properly, help their constituents prepare for it, and refrain from the demagoguery of appealing to their greatest fears.

Humans overcame their fear to cross oceans and go to the moon. We now need to contain our fear and harness AI to create a better world.