The AI Tsunami
I’ve been thinking a lot about the spread of AI, partly stimulated by fellow authors who dismiss it as some combination of capitalist plot, hoax and plagiarism machine that they very much hope will collapse and go away.
It won’t. It’s too powerful, too pervasive and spreading too fast. A passage from Sebastian Mallaby’s book, The Infinity Machine, is closer to the truth:
“At some point in the not-so-distant future, artificial intelligence will beat human intelligence at almost every mental task, and to say this marks a watershed would be a parody of understatement. Artificial intelligence heralds a transformation more profound than anything since Homo Sapiens acquired the capacity for abstract thought, some seventy thousand years ago.” (p. xii)
Mallaby writes that he’s long been fascinated by the predicament of scientists. On one hand, they are just seekers of truth, but they are also “the destroyers of all things: our jobs, our ways of thinking, potentially even our existence. Artificial intelligence stands accused of threatening humans in all these ways.”
The developers of AI see its power and expect it to change almost everything. They are simultaneously hopeful that AI will usher in a new golden age for society, and terrified that their work will lead to catastrophe.
At a recent conference, a panel of Harvard scientists agreed that AI is an “atomic bomb” revolutionizing the research process. They described employing AI to write papers, mine huge volumes of data, automate writing code, and accelerate research as much as tenfold. These systems remain prone to errors and hallucinations and still require close supervision by experts, but already have proved one of the most disruptive innovations of our lifetimes. David Parkes, dean of the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, noted that the capabilities of AI systems are doubling every seven months.
In health care as well, AI is speeding research and enabling doctors to off-load some of their more routine tasks so they have more time to spend with patients.
But there are many risks. AI development is a very expensive game so the major players are big companies with deep pockets. Will AI accelerate a long-term trend toward increasing concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer gigantic corporations?
New technologies historically destroy some jobs but create new ones. AI may destroy a far higher percentage of existing jobs than any previous technical advance, and the pace of change may mean that many jobs will disappear long before new ones come along to replace them. That level of human cost would weigh heavily on political dynamics.
Kevin Roos wrote in the New York Times in March, 2025:
“I believe that over the next decade, powerful A.I. will generate trillions of dollars in economic value and tilt the balance of political and military power toward the nations that control it — and that most governments and big corporations already view this as obvious, as evidenced by the huge sums of money they’re spending to get there first.”
He added:
“I believe that most people and institutions are totally unprepared for the A.I. systems that exist today, let alone more powerful ones, and that there is no realistic plan at any level of government to mitigate the risks or capture the benefits of these systems.”
A year later, he still looks to be right on both counts.