AI, Part 2

Part 2 this week on AI:

America is embroiled in a love-hate relationship with artificial intelligence. As The Atlantic plainly stated in a May 13^th article:

“America is both the world’s foremost developer of AI and its chief hater.”

The article continues:

“….The AI industry has spent recent years warning of a jobless future. So far, narratives about labor displacement have been largely speculation. While a smattering of tech executives have attributed job cuts to AI, many analysts have accused these CEOs of ‘AI-washing’ – essentially, using the technology as a scapegoat for roles they would have eliminated regardless. If anything, AI has mostly been a financial boon for the country, buoying the stock market and driving growth. But that could all change, of course. Imagine the uproar if jobs across the economy truly start disappearing en masse.”

“Many politicians, including President Trump, have cheered on Silicon Valley in a bid to win the supposed AI race with China. But the pro-AI crowd is starting to worry about the backlash. In March, at a conference about AI, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat, told me that he’s ‘enormously concerned’ that ‘populism from both the left and the right’ could curb innovation.”

Just as the world changed when we stopped farming and moved to the cities to do a different type of work, today’s prognosticators are seeing a murky crystal ball as we try to answer: “What will be the impact of the Tech Revolution and its newest star – artificial intelligence?”

“Silicon Valley is fond of likening AI to the Industrial Revolution. In such comparisons, the tech industry likes to point to the immense wealth that industrialization unlocked. Over the long run, it’s true that the Industrial Revolution radically boosted economic growth. But living through it was another matter entirely. Many people saw their wages stagnate and working conditions deteriorate as factory owners and industrialists came into immense wealth. (Just read a Charles Dickens novel, and you’ll get the idea.) This led to riots and, occasionally, attacks on industrialists themselves. Automation wasn’t the only problem during this period. A combination of trade disruptions and poor harvests led to inflation and, especially, high food prices. But machines became a target for people experiencing financial hardship more broadly.”

“….One poll found that when sorted by household income, the group of Americans most optimistic about AI in their daily lives are those making more than $200,000. The near future of AI seems likely to further entrench such dynamics: OpenAI and Anthropic are both nearing trillion-dollar valuations, consolidating even more money and power among a select few. ‘Disruption has winners and losers,’ Nathanial Perily, a Stanford law professor and AI expert, told me. ‘For many Americans, they’re not convinced they’re going to be the winners, and they base that conclusion on the history of technology over the last 20 years.’ If the tech industry truly believes that a simple change in messaging will quell the backlash, then they are misunderstanding the problem entirely.”

For years, while serving as a campus leader and a regional superintendent inside a traditional K-12 school district, I was frustrated when bad teachers kept their jobs because we couldn’t find better replacements. I thought to myself “Can technology one day help me get rid of bad teachers?” Sadly, I retired before artificial intelligence became a definite probability to help solve the problem of bad teaching.

If artificial intelligence can help rid the education sector of bad teachers, and those fired are pressed to find different employment, then so be it. Education’s bottom line must be making young learners smarter and stronger. And other leaders from other sectors most assuredly feel the same way regarding their specific bottom lines.

Disruption is never pleasant. But we all remember the quote attributed to Henry Ford when asked about how most felt about his 1896 Quadricycle – “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Friday News Roundup coming tomorrow. Til then. SVB