Confessions of a Techno-Optimist – Religion & Liberty Daily

Not since the Industrial Revolution has humanity looked upon a technological transformation at the scale of the Digital Revolution. Before the Industrial Revolution, one might for an analogue have to look back to the prehistoric transition from hunting-gathering to settled agriculture. In such periods of flux and change, a cardinal virtue is to be prepared to meet the uncertain, which is one of the few certainties.

But the uncertainties of the Digital Revolution have proved overwhelming for many in Washington, D.C., as well as in the commentariat. Bernie Sanders, always the good socialist, predictably in June put forward a bill to “give” half of large artificial intelligence (AI) companies to the federal government. That hat is older than the senator who wears it. In a more novel development, President Donald Trump, the leader of the Republican Party, which traditionally has objected to socialism, seems also to want equity in American AI companies.

Whether flirtations with public ownership will be consummated remains unclear, but the Trump administration has already assumed the fearful power of life and death over advanced AI models—a power that the United States has to date generally denied the federal government. The White House carried out “rushed, opaque, and legally dubious” action (as put by the Abundance Institute’s Neil Chilson) to ban, functionally, Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and Fable 5. Will Rinehart of the American Enterprise Institute said it well: “We have entered a world where a frontier model is considered ‘secure’ when the government says so.” Freedom to innovate under an ever-present threat of extinction at the whim of politicians and bureaucrats is no genuine freedom, and the character of this false freedom certainly is not American.

These innovations in technology policy are symptoms with a cause: anxiety over technological development and its corollary, industrialization, which has been a routine feature in American history. The pessimists’ fretting could fill a vast archive, and yet thus far America has generally maintained its characteristic bold and hopeful disposition. To simplify, events have proceeded thus: Americans strive to operate on and improve their world; innovation foments anxiety; anxiety is overcome as society and the law adjust sensibly to new conditions, preserving liberty, the seedbed of technological progress. In other words, previous bouts of innovation did not turn Americans toward socialism.

American optimism has prevailed since the dawn of the republic. In his autobiography, the great innovator Benjamin Franklin said that “as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours.” America would not join in Thomas Jefferson’s hope that the nation would remain an agricultural nation inhabited by yeomen farmers and that our workshops would remain in Europe. New technologies arose and industrialization advanced—thanks in part to President Jefferson’s own exclusionary trade policies—as Americans wondered at, and gloried in, what God had wrought.

“I know of nothing so pleasant to the mind, as the discovery of anything which is at once new and valuable—nothing which so lightens and sweetens toil, as the hopeful pursuit of such discovery,” said Abraham Lincoln, the champion of opportunity for the common man. Although Lincoln spoke primarily of agriculture, his was the spirit of American industry. And as industry gained strength—as the map became crisscrossed with telegraph lines and railroads, as factories were raised, and as the machines began to whirr and clank—Lincoln’s common man benefited: U.S. GDP per capita doubled between 1870 and 1913, the land of liberty besting the Old World. On and on it went, the development of the richest and most powerful nation known to man.

Man does not, of course, live by GDP alone; homo economicus is a mythical creature in which no respectable economist believes. Indeed, many have become anxious because they believe artificial intelligence will create a new breed of human being—will bring about a de-evolutionary process, so to speak. This new creature, made comfortable, relieved of the necessity to contend with difficulty or even to think much, will imbibe the dull prosperity produced by a fully technologized society in which his genius and person is rendered increasingly obsolete. Jobs will be outsourced not overseas but to the machines, leaving millions to the despair of idleness. Reading and reasoning will be made obsolete, populating the world with futuristic agents and quadrupeds with no more than primitive intellects. Superior artificial intelligence will best human intelligence at every turn, causing the latter to abandon the field. In Tocquevillian terms, this is the enervation of the soul.

This need not, however, be our future. Technological advance can be reversed only by the fall of civilization itself, but what is to be done with technology is a matter to be determined. To return to Tocqueville: “Providence has created man neither entirely independent nor completely slave. It traces around each man, it is true, a fatal circle out of which he cannot go; but within its vast limits, man is powerful and free; so are peoples.” Technological facts—and, for that matter, economic, geographic, climatic facts—mark us, even form us to some degree. But those who say such facts remove all choice, all agency, from individuals or nations or humanity itself, constrict Tocqueville’s fatal circle—shrink it so drastically as to transform man into little more than a victim of time, place, and chance. What AI makes of us will largely be determined by what we choose to make of AI.

In short, technological progress offers up a blessing and a curse, between which we must choose. But the choice remains ours. On the other hand, techno-optimists often are wont too quickly to brush past anxieties about the things new innovations might replace.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of the party of hope and the party of memory. We optimists must not lose ourselves in the enthusiasm of our expectations, even as we work to bring them to pass. The party of hope must take care not to lose its memory, lest it forget itself.

Every technological advancement brings about some creative destruction, and often the things that disappear are beautiful. Socrates believed that writing would “produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it”; literary man would never regain the capacity for memorization exhibited by men of oral traditions. Jefferson’s case against American industrialization rested on his belief in the republican virtues of the independent yeoman farmer. That farmer is, generally speaking, no more. Russell Kirk pronounced the automobile a “mechanical Jacobin.” Many modern thinkers, having overcome the early–Industrial Age distrust of factory work, now view postwar Rust Belt work arrangements as a beau ideal that must be retrieved.

To know that archetypes have slipped away, irrevocably, is not to say that they were not, within the particulars of their times and places, good and beautiful. There is no reason to obfuscate: Something is lost whenever a good thing is rendered obsolete. But other good things, maybe better things, may be gained. Moreover, such a recognition is neither merely historically interesting nor some shallow, impoverished form of sentimentalism. In every age, if they function properly, the associations, societies, and nations that men inhabit create and foster archetypes of virtue—public and private—that mold the same old clay of human nature toward its ideal form. The pre-literary sage, the Jeffersonian landholder, and the innumerable other examples that teem in the pages of history books inform us moderns as we seek to create our own archetypes of virtue for the digital age and beyond. In fact, without such examples for our emulation, we have little hope of succeeding in our work.

There is another question we must invariably confront: What archetypes will we leave to our descendants? Western civilization has gifted us innumerable models. As AI alters so many facts of modern life, we, the beneficiaries of civilizational bounty, must come to know that our own time for choosing is also one for choosing for our children and theirs. If we choose to use AI to its highest purpose—as an assistant to human genius and a tool, to use a trite but apt phrase, for human flourishing—the archetypes of virtue and character we embody will provide a new series of patterns to which future generations may look. If we falter, if we succumb to despair or fear, we will leave a void, or worse.

Our choice, however, extends well past the question of how we ought to use AI, or even how innovators ought to construct their models. Socialist policies imposed to manage this revolutionary technology will deform the character of the American people also. The pessimists consider themselves conservatives on technological questions but propose to embark upon a revolution in American government. To preserve the good life, they tell us, we must jettison the freedoms on which the pursuit of happiness depends. No vain denials of the scope of proposed state control can convincingly gainsay that contradiction. If our children are to be free, we must remain free men.

I fear that even if the pessimists fail to impose their statism, their spirit, if it catches on, will nudge our digital society toward the emergence of the dystopia they predict. For many, their worrying verges on defeatism: the belief that AI technologies, if not taken by the throat by the strong hand of public power, will inevitably best the best instincts of humanity. To create a free nation in which AI exists to benefit humanity, one must first be able to imagine it. To declare during the technology’s infancy that, without the policies of Beijing and Moscow, we cannot use it without being mastered by it, amounts to a declaration of servitude—a hard servitude to an un-American form of government if the pessimists achieve their policy aims, or a softer, more comfortable, almost invisible servitude to technology itself if their fatalistic assumptions spread and Americans fail to construct a humane digital future through their individual choices.

“No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, can bring comfort to his soul,” Winston Churchill wrote. Neither can all the massed forces of the state, no matter how benevolent. Charting the course through the narrow, dangerous straits beyond which lie the open seas of ordered, virtuous liberty has never failed to baffle most sailors, but it can be done—as Americans have proved over and again since 1776. We have good cause for hope that, in Churchill’s words, “all will be well.” We may be honest and perceptive enough to see the difficulties and dangers of our age without despairing. We must see them to avoid them, and also to make full use of the great blessings technology promises. This is the cri de coeur of a techno-optimist.