Artificial intelligence is on its way to becoming the greatest grievance-producing machine the world has seen. Economic revolutions have always been followed by powerful backlashes on the part of the aggrieved. In Britain, Luddites smashed the power looms that took their jobs in the 1810s and, in the U.S., populists raged against the giant companies that reordered their lives after the Civil War.
Unless properly handled, the AI transformation will produce rebellions on a scale we have never seen before. Economic revolutions produce grievances for three main reasons. They disrupt established ways of doing things, make a small number of people exceedingly rich and deprive workers and citizens of a sense of agency.
Resentment can smolder unnoticed, but then suddenly catch fire in the form of populist movements, wild conspiracies and violent assaults on machines or people. Luddites smashed more than a thousand machines between 1811 and 1817 and the British government deployed as many as 14,000 troops to crush them. U.S. populists demonized the likes of Rockefeller and Carnegie as “robber barons” and engaged in violent strikes.
English weavers complained not only that their skills were being devalued but that they were losing control of their own lives. Americans believed they’d fallen into the hands of inhuman corporations.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
