Science Fact Outpaces Science Fiction With AI

It’s been a hectic start to the new year for artificial intelligence. While the American government announced a massive AI infrastructure investment OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank, a Chinese company, DeepSeek, released a lower-cost artificial intelligence system upending the stock market and forced a recalibration of the AI landscape.
But the uncertainty and rapidly changing environment shouldn’t be that unfamiliar. The innovation and disruption so prized by entrepreneurs and championed by the high-tech intelligentsia has been a hallmark of AI as the technology expands into more areas of work and life. And while it may seem to be a new wrinkle on the story of discovery, it is a tale as old as time.
Once you get past the whiz-bang nature of AI and all the hype surrounding the technology, it is apparent artificial intelligence is simply the next labor-saving device, or as commentator Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story
The commercialization of invention led to the production for labor-saving devices, and it was not a hard sell. Machines that washed and dried your clothes inside at home or ovens that cooked a baked potato in minutes – though never seemed to be able to do it well – are part of the modern way of life.
From hand-crank telephones attached to the wall to touch-tone phones to mobile phones to smart phones, the evolution in communications has been a mostly welcome development. And let’s not forget personal computers.
The list of such devices is long and growing, so it should come as no surprise that artificial intelligence is just another labor-saving device
And like every other time we save labor somewhere, someone else loses labor when their jobs are downsized, outsourced or simply eliminated to be replaced by a machine.
Nineteenth century textile workers know all about that. Their solution was to break the steam-powered looms, apocryphally throwing their wooden shoes, or sabots, into the gears of the machines, thereby sabotaging them. Unfortunately, there is no evidence supporting that tale, but it does paint an accurate picture of the frustration those displaced workers felt.
As AI technology advances, allowing for ever more tasks to be completed by machines and a new wave of displaced employees, there is certain to be an increased level of frustration and ill will aimed at the state-of-the-art systems that put them out of work. Buggy whip makers know that feeling as do untold numbers of workers who saw their jobs taken over by more efficient processes.
In the popular imagination, artificial intelligence will lead us to a robot apocalypse where the machines take over and, if the science fiction writers are to be believed, ultimately decide that human beings are a danger to themselves and must be eliminated.
But the science fact of the matter is AI is the latest invention to shake up society with new and better ways to do things. While some are apprehensive about the future of artificial intelligence, it is unlikely it will be stopped. Instead, we will adapt to the changes, find the silver lining in the dark clouds of submission to our robot overlords and AI will just be another labor-saving device alongside dishwashers, refrigerators and indoor plumbing.
