Against the Industrial Revolution as a Defense of AI
One of the common arguments I see in defense of AI is an appeal to its inevitability, often paired with a reference to the Industrial Revolution. "Just think of how foolish the people looked who fought the futile war against progress back then," it's often said. "They were ultimately powerless to constrain the progress of technology. Plus, we should be grateful that the Luddites failed, because look how much better life became as a result! Why would you want to mirror their mistake when it's so obvious that history is repeating itself?"
This line of reasoning is quite faulty. I will explain why.
The Certainty of Hindsight
The inevitability of the effects of the Industrial Revolution only exists in hindsight. For the people alive and making decisions at the time, there was obviously no such assurance that things would end up as they have. This observation sounds banal, perhaps, but keeping it in mind is the best defense against the idea that AI's "inevitability" is a mirror to the "inevitability" of the technological progress that came before. It is epistemologically unfounded to believe we can simultaneously inhabit the mindset of Industrial Revolution's architects, making decisions to actively encourage the results we desire, and the mindset of contemporary humans, looking back at history with a comprehensive understanding that was unavailable at the time. To present ourselves as existing in both worlds is to take the omniscience and wisdom of students of history and insist that it must also apply to current events whose course we are currently charting. Regardless of how inevitable the Industrial Revolution appears to us now, it was by no means inevitable to the people who lived through it. If the rise of AI does turn out to have been inevitable, it will only be known in hindsight by the generations that come after us, and the people living today who assert it to be so will not have been forward-thinking seers, but overconfident fools who happened to end up correct. Few things are truly inevitable, and fewer still are those we can recognize as such in advance. An infinitely complex web of economics, culture, geopolitics, and individual decision-making, such as the Industrial Revolution then or the rise of AI now, is by no means one of them. To insist otherwise is disingenuous.
The Collapse of Nuance and Dismissal of Suffering
Even if the Industrial Revolution had been inevitable, this parallel is often painted with an implicit "and thank God it was!" The Industrial Revolution led to a higher standard of living that contemporary people now take for granted, and we are almost certainly better off for it. The parallel invites us to conclude that, likewise, the inevitable rise of AI will similarly lead to breathtaking advancements in quality of life.
Proponents of this argument often elide the sheer weight of unimaginable suffering borne by the people for whom the Industrial Revolution was not a willful choice: the men, women, and children mangled in factories before regulatory bodies existed; the farmers whose livelihoods were destroyed; the victims of the crime, pollution, and vices of burgeoning cities; the victims of historical knock-on effects, including the World Wars and the rise of Communism; and the countless millions or billions of people who have endured the stagnation and soul-sucking corrosiveness of the post-industrial workplace. The fruits we enjoy of the Industrial Revolution are engorged with the blood and tears of unthinkable masses of people who suffered and died to grow them. This nuance is often collapsed in arguments about AI, which point to such boons as washing machines and cars and computers and declare it beyond question that things worked out just the way they were supposed to for the maximal benefit of the human race.
I think this is a profoundly ghoulish lens through which to view our history. If the armless victim of a factory equipment malfunction, left without a means to support himself and rotting in the gutter in an overcrowded, disease-ridden city, or the ten-year-old chimney sweep who isn't allowed to enjoy her childhood lest her family not make enough money, who will later die of black lung, or the eleven malnourished children packed into a single-room tenement house were to receive a visit from a twenty-first-century time traveler, I don't believe they'd jump for joy in the knowledge that their abject suffering is helping pave the way for TikTok and rocket ships, which they will never see. This idea that the agony of people in the past must have been worth it in order that I, personally, may lounge on the couch and play video games today is completely bereft of empathy and compassion for those who came before us.
If this objection sounds melodramatic, if it seems obtusely contrarian to decry the Industrial Revolution as something that should not have happened, bear in mind that it doesn't singularly apply to the Industrial Revolution. It applies equally well to the entirety of human history. In other words, if the Industrial Revolution was "worth it" to get us to this point, the same must be said for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the Holocaust, and the suffocation of serfs under European feudalism, and for literally every horrible event that has ever happened. Can we confidently declare that these things were regrettable, but ultimately worth it? After all, here and now many (but not all!) of us enjoy an unprecedented quality of life. If the downsides of the Industrial Revolution are dismissed, so must be the downsides of everything else which got us to this point.
It must be emphasized that this reality cannot be waved away as a series of unlike comparisons. It's not as if we can declare that, say, the Holocaust contributed to the modern world by this much, so we're safe in declaring that it wasn't worth it and shouldn't have happened, but that the Industrial Revolution contributed to the modern world by this much, so the suffering it caused was cool, don't worry about it. We can't chop history into discrete slices and analyze them for their precise impact on the modern world. We must dismiss all suffering or none of it as "worth it" to have resulted in our modern comforts. We have, for some reason, largely seemed to overlook how disastrous the Industrial Revolution was for its contemporaries; their misfortune cannot be dismissed without similarly dismissing the victims of, say, the Holocaust, whose plight is considered a much more difficult bullet to bite.
It may be countered that empathy directed at those long-dead is without merit, and that this argument consists only of wringing my hands for people who don't exist to benefit from it. I disagree that empathy must have a tangible, extant target to be worth feeling, but setting that aside, the greater point is that if we declare the rise of AI to be more or less analogous to the Industrial Revolution, we ought to remember that most people during the transition were not in a position to benefit from it. The benefits of the Industrial Revolution were purchased for later generations at the cost of present suffering. This is the paramount concern of many AI detractors; the vast majority of people who live will not be poised to benefit from AI, as it takes jobs and makes humans increasingly redundant, and the notion that later generations may (or may not!) enjoy a higher quality of life is cold comfort when the technology is ripping society apart right now. It is not fair that the people who are obliged to bear the brunt of "progress" should not have an outsized role in deciding whether such "progress" ought to occur at all. Just as I do not blame people for wanting to put AI back in the bottle today, I would not have held it against an impoverished factory worker to wish that the Industrial Revolution would stop, even knowing, as I do, how great it would turn out for me down the road.
The Allure of "Progress"
Speaking of "progress," the rise of AI is often labeled so in the hope that it will trigger our cultural reflex in favor of it. The march of technology is a cornerstone of the modern world. Constantly moving forward is seen as a worthy end in and of itself. Stagnation and regression are unthinkable to us, and so we must bravely bear the load of "progress."
This is a misalignment of values. Progress is not an absolute good, worthy of our effort and pain for its own sake. AI should be adopted if and when it benefits us and makes the world a better place, not for the sake of progress but for our sake. It must be adopted by the will of people the world over, not just at the whims of billionaires, politicians, and their sycophants. If we, collectively, decide that its costs are worth it for the promise of future gains, those costs must be doled out fairly, lest we find ourselves in the position of the indigent masses whose agony is blithely cast aside by arrogant techbros and billionaires sitting on thrones of gold, who fancy themselves closer to gods than men.
Perhaps AI is worth pursuing. Perhaps its benefits are worth the costs. If so, better to explain why than to vaguely gesture to the Industrial Revolution, which was not inevitable, not worth it for most humans, and not itself appreciated merely for the sake of nebulous "progress."