In a LinkedIn post recently, Ethan Mollick wrote, the following statement. And he's not the only one to have said things like this.
«I don’t think it is good for anybody that there is an emerging "anti-AI" group that is actually a coalition of many groups with different worries (jobs, kids using AI, slop, existential risk, the environment, industry concentration). Because of the diverse constituencies, this group may only be able agree on a full halt to AI as a remedy.
Not only is a halt to AI development or use unlikely, but it undermines the desire to make policies that channel AI to good uses or that mitigate specific harms. AI is a general purpose technology that will impact many aspects of society, work, and education, all of which will require their own consideration.»
I feel like this is lately a common refrain among some people, especially some of the technology professionals such as I cross paths with at LinkedIn, and I needed to respond to it, not just to him individually, but to the community of people who think such things.
This
is the reply I wrote, lightly edited to suit the layout of this forum:
Accepting for conversation your notion of an emerging “broad coalition of the trodden upon,” perhaps instead of bemoaning that their common thought is to shut down “AI”, it'd behoove “AI” proponents to focus on not trodding upon so many people in so many ways?
Disdaining the already-disdained is a bad look.
How odd to suggest that because there are so many disparate kinds of injury, with so little commonality other than “AI” itself, it's reason to be dismissive rather than more aware.
“Get used to it,” in other domains of injustice, has not aged well.
Few question potential positives. Speak to the negatives so routinely trivialized.
Star Trek teaches us technology must move in lockstep with wisdom. Some want to race ahead to see where tech leads. It's already feeding power imbalance with no check in sight.
We were told automation would bring freedom and leisure time. But just a few are enriched. Many just scramble more.
Instead of shutting down “AI” maybe strong regulation, a serious automation tax, more unemployment benefits, reeducation help, student loan forgiveness, and UBI? But the already-disproportionately rich use wealth to oppose these.
See also my 2023 essay Technology's Ethical Two-Step.
Author’s Notes:
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This is one of a series of transplanted articles from my my LinkedIn feed or my Mastodon feed. Putting them here reaches a different audience and allows me to more easily refer back to them by name. Apologies to anyone who reads my writing in more than one place and find this redundant.
In making the image, I used Gemini 3 Flash, Nano Banana, and GPT-4o at abacus.ai, with light post-processing in Gimp to reduce the resulting image in size for faster web download.
