We Are Still Underreacting on AI

This is not just a technology issue, it’s a fundamental change to our society—and we remain dangerously underprepared.

Over the last few weeks, I have been spending more time studying artificial intelligence, the people working on it, and the activity around it. As I’ve done so, it has become clear to me that—even with all of the media attention and public interest in this topic—we are still profoundly underreacting, and we are dangerously underprepared.

By “we,” I mean American society in general, but also the political and policy world in particular, certainly including the Democratic Party.

And when I say we’re “underprepared,” I don’t just mean for the physically dangerous or potentially nefarious effects of these technologies, which are obviously enormous and will take tremendous effort and wisdom to manage. But I want to draw more attention to a set of questions about what this will mean for wealth and poverty, work and unemployment, citizenship and power, isolation and belonging.

In short: the terms of what it is like to be a human are about to change in ways that rival the transformations of the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution, only much more quickly.

I’ll have much more to say about this in the months ahead, but what I want to stress now is that we must learn to think of this less as a technology issue, and more as an issue of everyday life, requiring urgent political attention. I often say that doing politics and policy well means putting everyday life—not political personalities or Washington drama—at the heart of our thinking. Applying that kind of thinking to the issues surrounding AI makes it immediately clear that we will need to summon at least as much economic and political imagination today, as it took to handle the everyday impacts of the Great Depression, World War II, or the invention of electricity and later the Internet.

The enormous opportunities and terrifying challenges associated with AI, some of which are likely to materialize in the next three to five years, don’t just matter to a venture capital firm or the owner of a cornfield being turned into a data center. Our experiences as citizens, consumers, parents, employees, students, and more, will soon go through their biggest changes in generations. Each facet of life will become very different—and the biggest difference of all is that this time, the changes will play out not over the course of generations but rather in less time than it takes an American student to complete high school.

That raises the likelihood that soon, the number one leadership challenge for world leaders, including the President of the United States, will be to manage the changes that AI is bringing about, and to use the visibility of office and the tools of policy to ensure that this technology makes people better off and not worse off. Yet our president—and his opposition—have yet to make clear what their AI policies even are.

The coming policy battles won’t be over whether to be “for” or “against” AI. It is developing swiftly no matter what. What we can do is take steps to ensure that it leads to more abundant prosperity and safety rather than deprivation and danger. Whether it does one or the other is, at its core, not a technology problem but a social and political problem. And that means it’s up to us.

No technology is good or bad all on its own. What matters is how people use it, what it does for us and to us, whom it is used to help or to hurt, and who gets to decide. It’s time for that conversation to happen—quickly, and with much more depth than we’ve seen so far in our political world—and I’ll be doing my part to help develop our response while there is still time.