Day 334: AI and Our Cherished Institutions

Photo by Louis Velazquez on Unsplash

Just as I’ve been thinking a lot about AI and its potential to displace human social control in the world, I came across this quote:

“Is there, indeed, a danger that the race which has made our country great will pass away, and that the ideals and institutions which it has cherished will also pass?”

These are the words of Prescott Hall, co-founder and chief advocate of the Immigration Restriction League. From its founding in 1894, the IRL worked ardently for a quarter century from its founding to stop immigration. In 1924, they succeeded (for a while).

Of course, Hall wanted to preserve the control of certain humans over others. Current fears center around preserving the control of humans over a “new digital species” created by humans.

Once technology sets a trend in motion, however, humans may not be able to stop it. Hall worried about this in the 1890s (in language that evokes objections to the immigration waves of today):

“Formerly, America was a hard place to get to, and a hard life awaited those who came, although the free and fertile land offered rich prizes to those with the energy to grasp them. To-day, the steamship agent is in every little town in Europe; fast steamers can bring thousands in a few days, and wages, often indeed not enough for an American to live decently on, but large in the eyes of the poor European peasants, await the immigrant on landing. There is, moreover, abundant testimony to the fact that much of the present immigration is not even a normal flow of population, but is artificially stimulated in every possible way by the transportation companies which have many millions invested in the traffic.”

The technology of change may be different this time — radically different — but the process is the same. Man innovates. Society changes. People move. Control shifts. Repeat.

At some point, perhaps the innovation creates a quantum leap of change. Can humans control it?