There have been plenty of others, and we\u2019ll save the spelunking in those myriad apocalyptic rabbit holes for another time. But it\u2019s worth noting that such panics are pretty common in secular, modern societies, too. And I don\u2019t just mean weird cults like the Branch Davidians or the Hale-Boppers. Most readers are old enough to remember the \u201cY2K\u201d panic, when all of our technology was expected to go bonkers for lack of a couple of extra decimal points of computer code.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There are other moments of quasi-millenarian panic\u2014or confidence!\u2014that are more relevant. Since the rise of liberal democratic capitalism, there have been moments when lots of people convinced themselves that we were on the brink of vast civilizational change (in no small part because they craved vast civilizational change). Again, such convictions predate the liberal democratic capitalist revolution, but they take a specific form in our era. Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin, and Mao were convinced that the existing order was poised to be swept away and that they\u2019d do the sweeping. Karl Marx is the most influential of these secular prophets. His influence\u2014as undeserved as it was\u2014rested on a kind of millenarian logic rebranded as \u201cscientific socialism.\u201d As if by an Iron Law only he could interpret, the bourgeois order was destined to be swept aside. Even among non-Marxist progressives, this underlying assumption that massive change was unavoidable and nigh drove a lot of ideological and political assumptions. I am not exaggerating when I say FDR\u2019s \u201cNew Deal\u201d tapped into this conviction. What is a New Deal other than a fresh start? A do-over? A reimagining of how the system works?<\/p>\n
Collectivism and statism have periodically been hailed as the Next Big Thing. Sometimes this is a sincere belief. But I also think that freedom\u2014capitalism, modernity, whatever you want to call it\u2014has a tendency to nurture the belief that if we can just replace the current system with some form of collective nationalized politics, the state or the \u201cmovement\u201d will fill the holes in our souls.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the wife of the more famous Lindbergh, wrote an instant bestseller called The Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith (I appreciate the honesty of the subtitle). According to Lindbergh, collectivism and statism were coming under many different names\u2014fascism, communism, nationalism, socialism\u2014and there was nothing we could do about it. \u201cThe evils we deplore in these systems are not in themselves the future; they are scum on the wave of the future,\u201d Lindbergh wrote<\/a>. As with the French Revolution, we should accept a lot of egg-breaking in exchange for the Great Omelet to come.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n A lot of this can best be understood as Ferris Buellerism. See a parade marching your way? Jump in front and proclaim yourself the leader. Don\u2019t see a parade yet? Pretend it\u2019s coming anyway, and act as if you\u2019re its leader-in-waiting. I\u2019ve written a lot about this sort of thing when it comes to the new right and, before that, Hillary Clinton\u2019s \u201cpolitics of meaning<\/a>,\u201d or Obama\u2019s allegedly \u201cnew politics<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n What interests me about all of the AI talk is how it already appears to be a rich cocktail of these different political and non-political impulses, and people are getting drunk on it. Some are angry drunks, some happy. But signs of the drinking binge are as obvious as dozens of pages of Xeroxed asses strewn across the office the day after the office Christmas party.\u00a0<\/p>\n Already we hear about various AI-worshipping cults<\/a> sprouting<\/a> up. We\u2019re constantly told, in the words<\/a> of Chris Barry, a vice president at Microsoft: \u201cThe era of AI is here, ushering in a transformative wave with potential to touch every facet of our lives. \u2026 It is not just a technological advancement; it is a societal shift.\u201d My friend and AEI colleague Jim Pethokoukis sometimes sounds like<\/a> he believes AI will be some kind of magical philosopher\u2019s stone and fountain of youth in one. There\u2019s even a healthy dose of Cold War, Sputnik-style panic that the Chinese will beat us to AI nirvana and refuse to let us in. On the flipside, there\u2019s an almost religious fear that AI will enslave humanity. I\u2019ve lost count of the number of times fairly normal, sober-sounding people have floated the fear that a Butlerian Jihad<\/a> against the thinking machines may be necessary.\u00a0<\/p>\n Again, they all might be right. Though I don\u2019t think the nirvana and toiling in AI\u2019s silicon mines scenarios are compatible.\u00a0<\/p>\n But I can\u2019t shake my skepticism. I admit this might just be a personality quirk of mine. I reflexively dislike groupthink and moral panics, not to mention industrial policy and talk of new New Deals and, relatedly, I really dig liberal democratic capitalism. So I could be too enamored with my priors to see what is obvious to others.\u00a0<\/p>\n But take a look at this piece<\/a> from Axios founders Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen. \u201cWe\u2019ve talked to scores of CEOs, government officials and AI executives over the past few months,\u201d they report. \u201cBased on those conversations, we pieced together specific steps the White House, Congress, businesses and workers could take now to get ahead of the high-velocity change that\u2019s unspooling.\u201d They reassure us that \u201cNone requires regulation or dramatic shifts. All require vastly more political and public awareness, and high-level AI sophistication.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Okay, sounds good. But then they inform us that we need a \u201cMarshall Plan\u201d for AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n A what now? When I think of policies that involve \u201cdramatic shifts\u201d I tend to think of things like the Marshall Plan<\/a>. But wait, a mere Marshall Plan is inadequate to the challenge we face. They quote Scott Rosenberg, Axios\u2019 own managing editor for tech, who explains that what America really needs is \u201ca combination of the Marshall Plan, the\u00a0GI Bill<\/a>, the\u00a0New Deal<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 the social programs and international aid efforts needed to make AI work for the U.S. domestically and globally.\u201d<\/p>\n Oh. Is that all? No dramatic shifts or regulation were involved in those things.<\/p>\n I heard VandeHei (who I like) on TV the other day explaining that the CEOs and other AI researchers he talks to want this kind of Marshall Plan\/GI Bill\/New Deal trifecta. He makes it sound like they must be right.\u00a0<\/p>\n But hold on. If a journalist proclaimed that the auto or steel industry needed a \u201cMarshall Plan\u201d or \u201cNew Deal\u201d would anybody\u2014anybody without a pretty obvious vested interest\u2014say \u201cOh well, if that\u2019s what they want, who am I to argue?\u201d If the editors of the leading media outlets got together and insisted we need a Marshall Plan for journalism, would we say, \u201cWell, they\u2019re the experts. We have no choice.\u201d?<\/p>\n I\u2019m not saying there\u2019s anything inherently corrupt or sinister in these broad appeals for\u2014I\u2019m sorry, Jim\u2014drastic shifts and regulatory overhauls. But you don\u2019t have to be a student of public choice theory to be skeptical that the titans of a specific industry have a self-serving agenda when they invite an historic public-private partnership for the benefit of that industry.\u00a0<\/p>\n The brilliant Marxist historian Gabriel Kolko overturned the myths of the Progressive Era by pointing out that the just-so story of heroic government rescuing America from rapacious capitalism was actually mutually agreed-upon spin by Progressive bureaucrats and rapacious capitalists. For instance, in high school, I had to read Upton Sinclair\u2019s The Jungle, which told the story of how the meat packers\u2014Big Meat\u2014were greedy villains immiserating workers and poisoning consumers until the feds stepped in to save us. The problem is that it was a lie. Even Sinclair said as much: \u201cThe Federal inspection of meat was, historically, established at the packers\u2019 request,\u201d he admitted<\/a> in 1906. \u201cIt is maintained and paid for by the people of the United States for the benefit of the packers.\u201d Similarly, Kolko wrote, \u201cThe reality of the matter, of course, is that the big packers were warm friends of regulation, especially when it primarily affected their innumerable small competitors.\u201d As I wrote about in great detail in Liberal Fascism, this was the approach of big business throughout the Progressive Era and New Deal. When Mark Zuckerberg pleaded<\/a> with Congress for Big Tech to be regulated, he was updating the same playbook.\u00a0<\/p>\n I honestly don\u2019t know the right approach to AI. I don\u2019t even know if there is a single right approach, given that AI\u2014and the pursuit of it\u2014will have disparate impacts in all sorts of areas. Saying we should have a single \u201cAI policy\u201d is probably like saying we should have a single internet policy or transportation policy. That, of course, is ridiculous. Regulations for, say, pornography and jet packs will be different from regulations for math tutorial videos and donkeys.\u00a0<\/p>\n But when I hear smart people saying that AI is both the Wave of the Future, requiring fundamental transformations of government policy, and that it won\u2019t require drastic shifts or more regulation, I am fairly certain that there\u2019s some millenarian hysteria out there.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There have been plenty of others, and we\u2019ll save the spelunking in those myriad apocalyptic rabbit holes for…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":33856,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[691,738,15170,28167,398,1269,3229,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-33855","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-liberalism","11":"tag-marxism","12":"tag-media","13":"tag-opinion","14":"tag-regulation","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114786309414946130","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33855\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}