The Good Man Is the Builder

AI is revolutionary, but man has invented many a revolutionary thing. Understanding its arrival in the context of our history is key to its deployment for good.

From the Stone Age to today, man has invented in pursuit of information and motion—or, in today’s terms, data and speed. More, faster! The wheel, the dictionary, the printing press, the steam engine, the telegraph, the computer, nuclear power, and artificial intelligence—we are producing, going, and knowing at rates we can hardly wrap our minds around, but to ends we cannot (or do not) always foresee. The Industrial Revolution ushered in a new wave of economic and social mobility as well as climate destruction. The Digital Revolution led to explosions in information and connection as well as disinformation and isolation.

The AI Revolution similarly brims with opportunity, threatening to spill over into ruin. If it’s any consolation, we are not alone; there is precedent, and instruction, for our lives. Almost a century ago, T.S. Eliot’s play The Rock was performed. It opens with a message from the Chorus, who stand, all-knowing, between us and the goings on, a lightning rod of clarity:

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence:
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

If you think T.S. Eliot’s Chorus is lambasting man’s insatiable hunger for innovation and information, they’re only setting up the problem. In comes the Rock—“who has seen what has happened / And who sees what is to happen,” the past and the future—to tell us what remains constant in this endless cycle:

The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change.
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
…
The good man is the builder, if he build what is good.

The Rock changes the construction of his set up three different times—“The world turns…In all of my years…However you disguise it”—as if to prove his point that one thing alone does not change. “The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil” stands on its own line, independent of any alternate introductory clause, an eternal fact.

We think we have come so far since fire, but in each “Revolution,” literally each turning of the world, we remain at the same juncture between Good and Evil. AI is yet another paradigmatic shift in how we produce (work automated by AI agents), go (self-driving transportation), and know (generative synthesis and analysis of information), but now, as ever, “[t]he good man is the builder, if he build what is good.”

The Digital Revolution was yet another call for more, faster: computers allowed us to acquire and analyze more information and reach people faster, and the people we reached provided us with more information and faster feedback cycles, and so on. But all of this work required our eyes on our screens as much as possible: analysts poring over endless spreadsheets, consumers doom-scrolling through endless reels, real selves and digital selves converging.

I didn’t follow the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni dispute too closely, but I did read an article in the New York Times about it, and its language was telling of this convergence between the human and the digital: an online smear campaign strategist describes himself as a “hired gun,” and a brand marketing consultant conducts a “forensic review” of the negative online press. The article bears the title “‘We Can Bury Anyone.’” With digital personhood comes digital murder scenes!

A plethora of research (see here and here for examples courtesy of my Economics of Media class) indicates that this digital enmeshment is not good for us. More productive than ever, and perhaps more unhappy than ever, we recall the plaintive cry of the Chorus: “Where is the Life we have lost in living? / Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?”

At first blush, the mandate of the AI Revolution is no different from the others: more, faster. But upon closer inspection, we catch that the subject of the command is perhaps no longer us, but rather the technology itself. In the Digital Age, computers demanded that we bend to them: to code, you had to speak its language; to analyze, you had to use its formulas. Now, in the AI age, technology bends to us: whether to search or to synthesize, we can use the language that comes naturally to us and direct our attention elsewhere while it does more, faster, on our behalf.

So many media, social media, and digital companies define success as the number of eyeballs they command at any given moment: number of watchers who watch every month (MAU), number of watchers who watch every day (DAU), time spent watching every month, every day. But if we can just manage to pry our eyeballs away from them, we can recover what we’ve lost. In “The Welfare Effects of Social Media,” Allcott et al. found that deactivating Facebook for the month leading up to the 2018 US midterms increased both people’s time spent socializing with friends and their subjective wellbeing. With AI, we might finally be able to look up, emerge from our digital selves, and reconnect as humans—that’s the value proposition, anyway. If the Digital Revolution optimized—and monopolized—our time, the AI Revolution might free it.

Of course, automation is neither new, nor without its evils. The fears that AI is stoking are the same ones that machinery has elicited over the last century, new renditions of the familiar “the robots are taking over” refrain—all of them legitimate. In 1929, John Maynard Keynes coined the term “technological unemployment”:

We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.

In other words: unemployment due to our discovering more efficient ways of accomplishing the same tasks faster than we can discover novel forms of work. This prediction came true: a MIT and Boston University study found that 400,000 jobs have been eclipsed by robots. Although now AI threatens high- and low-skill work alike, low-income communities and people of color in low-medium-skill occupations have been disproportionately affected by this job displacement. In a somewhat fear-mongering Time article called “Find Out If a Robot Will Take Your Job,” you can enter your occupation and be told how safe or unsafe you are from the Robot Revolution (and then sit with that, since it doesn’t give you any steps you can take to help yourself).

However, he also posited that this affliction would be “only a temporary phase of maladjustment”—that, in time, we will adapt:

All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem. I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day. There would be nothing surprising in this even in the light of our present knowledge. It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of afar greater progress still.

This prediction, too, seems to be coming to fruition as automation does not necessarily replace but rather turbocharges people and businesses. Stanford scholars Yong Suk Lee and Jong Hyun Chung found that from 2011 to 2016, a correction occurred where for every additional robot, there was a gain of 13 to 14 jobs. And in Japan, perhaps the quintessential example of a nation revolutionized by automation, Lee and Professor Iizuka found that in nursing homes using robots, the robots had no significant effect on headcount.

I don’t mean to gloss over the “temporary phase of maladjustment,” however: before we can adapt our workforces to AI, real people’s livelihoods will be threatened, and we must account for and take care of them. It also remains to be seen whether or not those who have been or will be displaced can fill the new roles AI will create. And it’s possible that, before we come back to one another, the workplace and communication broadly will become even more commoditized: my AI agent emails your AI agent; there’s a misunderstanding, but it’s not a human one.

Yet, there are glimmers of hope that give us reason to believe in “the possibility of afar greater progress still.” The world keeps turning, but once again we are witnessing the struggle between Good and Evil, now manifesting in the drama of AI. We must remember: the good man is the builder, if he build what is good. Let the founders of the next generation of AI companies keep at the forefront of their minds what good AI can restore for humanity: knowledge of stillness, knowledge of silence, the life we have lost in living, the wisdom we have lost in knowledge.

Credit: Robbie George Photography