Katrin Bennhold
An A.I. boom or bubble?
In 2014, I read “The Second Machine Age,” a book by two M.I.T. economists. The authors offered a sort of utopian vision of A.I.: The technology would lead to an age of hyper-productivity and plenty, where the only question was how to distribute its gains fairly.
We could still get there, but it seems fair to say the road to utopia, if that is our destination, won’t be smooth. Current anxieties around whether A.I. has become too dominant in the global economy — what happens if it’s not all it’s cracked up to be? — sit alongside competing ones: What happens if A.I. is all it’s cracked up to be, and can replace all those humans after all? Would that really be a good outcome?
I spoke to my colleague Cade Metz, who writes about artificial intelligence. He told me every technological revolution has created anxiety during the transition from the old to the new, when jobs are destroyed, money is lost and companies go bust. The question is what emerges on the other side.
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