Change

I think one of the reasons people are so nervous about artificial intelligence is that we’re standing in the middle of a revolution, and revolutions are incredibly difficult to understand while you’re living through them.

But we’ve been here before.

Go back a little more than a hundred years.

America was moving from an agricultural society into an industrial society. Machines were transforming factories. Electricity was changing cities. And then along comes the automobile.

Think about the horse.

For centuries, the horse was part of the economic infrastructure of civilization. We needed people to breed horses, raise them, feed them, shoe them, build carriages, repair carriages, operate stables and clean up the enormous amount of shit they left behind.

That was an economy.

And then somebody comes rolling down the road in this noisy contraption called an automobile.

Imagine being in the horse business.

You’d probably look at that thing and say, “This is going to destroy everything.”

And you’d be right.

And you’d also be completely wrong.

Because the automobile destroyed some industries, but it created industries nobody could have imagined.

Suddenly we needed automobile factories.

We needed mechanics.

We needed gas stations.

We needed roads and highways.

We needed dealerships.

We needed automobile insurance.

We needed parking lots.

We needed trucking companies.

Then came motels and roadside restaurants and suburbs and shopping centers and an entire economy constructed around something that barely existed a generation earlier.

But here’s the part we sometimes leave out when we romanticize technological progress:

That transition wasn’t painless.

People lost jobs.

Businesses disappeared.

Communities changed.

People had skills that suddenly weren’t worth what they used to be worth.

And somebody living through that transition didn’t have the luxury we have today of looking backward and knowing how the story turned out.

They were scared.

And I think that’s exactly where we are with artificial intelligence.

We’re standing in the middle of the transition.

And people are asking:

What happens to my job?

What happens to my kids?

What happens if a machine can do what I’ve spent thirty years learning how to do?

Where the hell do I fit into this new world?

Those are legitimate questions.

Because this time we’re not simply building machines that replace muscle.

We’re building machines that can perform pieces of cognitive work.

They can write.

They can analyze.

They can code.

They can translate.

They can create images.

They can help diagnose problems.

They can process enormous amounts of information in seconds.

And that means this transformation isn’t confined to the factory floor.

It’s coming into offices.

Hospitals.

Schools.

Law firms.

Banks.

Small businesses.

City governments.

Pretty much everywhere.

And I don’t think the answer is to tell people, “Don’t worry. AI isn’t going to change your job.”

Of course it’s going to change jobs.

The better question is:

What are we going to do about it?

Because technology doesn’t determine whether a society succeeds.

People do.

When the automobile arrived, America eventually built an entire infrastructure around it.

Now we’re going to need a human infrastructure around artificial intelligence.

That means education has to change.

Job training has to change.

Businesses have to change.

Government has to change.

And maybe most importantly, our definition of education has to change.

The old model was pretty simple:

Go to school.

Learn something.

Get a job.

Do that job for thirty or forty years.

Retire.

That model makes a lot less sense in a world where technology may fundamentally change your profession several times during your working life.

Education can’t end at 18 or 22 anymore.

It has to become something we have access to throughout our lives.

Maybe you’re 25 and learning AI.

Maybe you’re 45 and retraining for an industry that didn’t exist when you graduated.

Maybe you’re 65 and starting something completely new.

Why the hell not?

And here’s what excites me.

The biggest opportunities created by AI probably haven’t even been invented yet.

A kid sitting in a classroom today may have a job twenty years from now that none of us could name today.

Think about explaining “social-media manager” to somebody in 1985.

Or “app developer.”

Or “YouTube creator.”

Or “cloud-computing engineer.”

They’d think you’d lost your mind.

The same thing is going to happen again.

So I understand why people are scared.

But I don’t think fear should be our strategy.

And neither should pretending that nothing is changing.

Our strategy should be preparation.

Teach people how to use these tools.

Make education available throughout people’s lives.

Help workers transition when industries change.

Encourage entrepreneurship.

And make sure this extraordinary technology isn’t something controlled and understood by a tiny group of people while everybody else stands outside wondering what happened to their livelihood.

Because AI shouldn’t just belong to Silicon Valley.

It should belong to the teacher.

The plumber.

The nurse.

The mechanic.

The small-business owner.

The student.

The 50-year-old changing careers.

And the 70-year-old who suddenly has an idea and wants to build something.

The Industrial Revolution changed what human beings could physically accomplish.

Artificial intelligence may change what human beings can intellectually accomplish.

That’s enormous.

And yes, it’s unsettling.

But we’ve crossed bridges like this before.

The horse didn’t understand the automobile.

The carriage maker couldn’t see the interstate highway coming.

And none of us can completely see what’s coming next.

But we don’t have to know exactly what the world will look like.

We just have to make damn sure that as we build it, there’s a place in that world for everybody.