“The outcome by 2040 depends a great deal, if not entirely, upon the regulatory framework created around AI. If we just consider the Internet, there have certainly been areas where it has created enormous value:
1) Researchers could not live without it anymore – it has made enormous amounts of data and information available at their fingertips. 2) Consumers have greater choices and opportunities with online shopping, while costing local retailers their livelihoods. 3) Entertainment opportunities are much broader, easier to find and get and probably much more attuned to individual tastes, but at the cost of creating a property-rights problem for intellectual capital and artistic output. 4) Individuals can create businesses and other enterprises on their own on the web. 5) And so forth.
“However, along the way, we have ruined the independent and trusted press and eviscerated small retailers; we have created opportunities for factions to develop on the web, as divide-seeking groups such as white nationalists have found one another and found a forum for their activities; and the spread of low-friction, instantaneous global communications has raised many additional complex challenges. One of the primary concerns that is still on the rise is that marginalized populations have not seen anywhere near the benefits of highly educated people.
We have ruined the independent and trusted press and eviscerated small retailers; we have created opportunities for factions to develop on the web. … We will have increased the sense of disorientation and confusion already felt by many people living a ‘digital life.’ Anxiety and depression will increase. People will feel powerless and in the grip of forces they do not understand. Horror stories will proliferate about those who have been tricked by AI, dealt with unfairly by it and generally misled. Populist sympathies will increase as people worry about losing their unique role in society.
“These trends will be exacerbated by AI unless there are efforts to regulate it. I am worried that we will lose jobs, create greater toxicity in our communications and politics and further disadvantage marginalized populations. Yet, we are likely to also find that AI is tremendously useful for individualized teaching, for taking care of the elderly, in providing personal assistance to individuals at work and at home, for precision medicine, for discovery using vast amounts of text and information, for optimizing traffic in cities, for designing houses in conjunction with 3-D printing, and so forth.
“My bottom-line belief is that regulation will be too late and too little because politicians are ill-equipped to do anything, and they will always be behind given the complexity of the issues involved and the difficulties of overcoming partisan polarization. As a result:
- We will have increased the sense of disorientation and confusion already felt by many people living a ‘digital life.’
- Anxiety and depression will increase.
- People will feel powerless and in the grip of forces they do not understand.
- Horror stories will proliferate about those who have been tricked by AI, dealt with unfairly by it and generally misled.
- Populist sympathies will increase as people worry about losing their unique role in society.
“If we think about the difficulties many people have regarding accepting evolution or gay people as human beings with rights, we can begin to imagine what will happen when they face the possibility that they might have to think of AI as ‘human.’ Religions will chime in about the ‘ghost’ or ‘devil’ in the machine.
“Most people are not ready to redefine, in this new digitally enabled realm, what it means to be a person, and AI threatens to require doing that. Hence, regulation – transparent and participatory regulation – is essential, but it requires a level of effort and innovation that I am not sure we are prepared to undertake.”
This essay was written in November 2023 in reply to the question: Considering likely changes due to the proliferation of AI in individuals’ lives and in social, economic and political systems, how will life have changed by 2040? This and more than 150 additional essay responses are included in the report “The Impact of Artificial Intelligence by 2040”