Doom or Bloom
Question 1
What do you think AI means for our future—and why?
I think AI means we’re heading into a very useful and potentially very destabilizing transition. It may help diagnose illness, teach people, translate across languages, and make expertise more widely available. That’s real. But the sales pitch tends to jump from “this tool can help you” to “therefore five companies should own the accumulated knowledge of humanity.” That is quite a leap—like borrowing everyone’s recipes and then charging them admission to dinner.
My biggest concern is speed and power. Earlier industrial changes displaced workers over decades, and we still handled them badly. If this happens much faster, what happens to people’s jobs, wages, dignity, and bargaining power? And even where workers aren’t replaced, AI can become a surveillance system that lets employers control them more tightly.
None of that is inevitable. Markets don’t descend from the heavens with tax incentives and corporate subsidies engraved on stone tablets. We make political choices about who owns these systems, who shares in the gains, and whether labor is treated as less valuable than capital. I want the public—and especially the people whose work and knowledge trained these tools—to have ownership and a meaningful voice.
And military use is chilling. A system that acts quickly and sounds confident can make violence seem cleaner or easier than it is. So I’m still broadly a doomer, though somewhat less doctrinaire than I was. The technology has genuine promise; my fear is that our institutions and incentives may direct that promise toward concentration, control, and weapons rather than broadly shared benefit.
