Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Fearing Technology

 Ever since humans began devising advanced technologies, a significant subset of society has expressed reservations about them. Historians note that technophobia emerged in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

As a young journalist in the 1970s, I covered the anti-nuke movement, which relied heavily on technophobia, and my own work about pesticides, Circle of Poison, inspired anti-technology feelings as well.

My personal opinions about nuclear energy and pesticides were always more mixed. Having grown up among farmers, I knew how hard they had to work to grow their crops, and how much they welcomed any tool, including chemicals, that eased that struggle.

In fact, “Circle of Poison” had much more to do with the hypocrisy of sending banned pesticides to Third World countries than it did with pesticides per se.

But in the course of researching “Circle,” I came to appreciate that the traditional methods of rotating crops, natural pests and other organic farming techniques were much better because they preserved the long-term viability of soil for sustainable agriculture into the future.

By contrast, the chemical-intensive methods that relied on fertilizers and pesticides not only were polluting the soil, air, water and foods in our farmlands, they were spurring resistance in pests and threatening our future ability to feed ourselves.

Accordingly, I developed a strong aversion to pesticides on ecological grounds, as opposed to a knee-jerk negative reaction based on technophobia. I came to think of it as an evidence-based opposition.

Nuclear power was a slightly different matter, but without the ability to store its wastes, it too was an ecological negative. For me, California’s Prop 15 in 1976 was the turning point, which I covered for Rolling Stone.

These days, I think about those experiences when I consider artificial intelligence. Society is once again split between those who are enthusiastic about the potential of AI (including its potential to produce profits) and those who fear it basically on principle.

I again have mixed feelings. As with pesticides and nuclear power, AI may represent a great step forward or it could lead us to disaster.

Almost certainly, as we get more familiar with AI, the best course will be a third way between enthusiasm and fear— embracing it but subjecting it to careful regulation like with pesticides and nuclear power, albeit in both cases imperfectly. There will be mistakes along the way with AI, like with nukes and pesticides, so let’s just hope this time they once again don’t prove fatal.

(I first published a version of this piece a year ago.)

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