Do Not Fear the Future
This is Part III of a three-part series on data centers and their impact. See Part I and Part II
Innovate Sayeth the Lord (Probably)
Part I of this series dealt with the overblown fear of the environmental impacts of AI data centers. Part II dealt with the real scandal involved in data center development: their government sponsored financing and all the economic distortions this brings. This last of the series will focus on the general idea that technological development is the harbinger of the End Times™.
I say general idea because it is an idea that has existed since the dawn of time. My guess is that when Og invented the wheel Nog said, “Hey, wait. This could run over someone or cause an adverse environmental impact”. Fortunately, Og told Nog to step off and humanity made progress. Yet, this is a classic case of a zombie idea that simply will not die.
There is no reason that any human should fear technological and social progress, but this is especially true for followers of Jesus. We are told time and again that we should “fear not”. Our future is guaranteed by our faith in Jesus as Risen Lord. We also live in the balance of a good and gracious God that has given us all we need in and on this earth to prosper and proclaim. Prosper, that is, if we but cooperate and trust in tomorrow. If we do not innovate and move forward we treat ourselves as something less than fully human. This is an affront to a God that has given us everything.
Same Old Song & Dance
We have seen this movie before, many times, in fact. Change comes upon humanity (when has it not?), then fear sets in. This fear may be the result of NIMBYism, protectionism, or just general fear of the unknown. There is an economic perspective to all this fear. Many times, I have cited the work of the economist Frédéric Bastiat, especially his most noted work That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen. His insight was that there are things we see as a result of some change, but too many fail to consider that which we cannot see.
We can see clearly the assembly line worker laid off because of labor automation. We see a customer service representative let go because AI can do the job. We see the software coders who are now redundant because AI can code more efficiently. These things people see look awful, and I do not wish to minimize the disruption that this kind of progress creates—it is real.
Yet, what remains unseen is the heart of the story. Few consider the new businesses and industries that are created because of this progress. Fewer still consider the burst of creativity that can occur when the tedious repetitive jobs are automated. There are whole new opportunities that present themselves when costs are greatly reduced because of technological progress. This inability to consider the unseen repeats itself with disheartening regularity.
Reality Destroys the Myth
Let’s specifically debunk the myths surrounding technology and machines. First, they do not on net cost jobs. It is true that some industries are made obsolete because of machinery but to argue that we should not allow this to happen is to consign humanity to a level of stasis that would see us revert to a standard of living most of us cannot imagine and not allow us to maintain anywhere near the number of people on the planet. That is, billions would die. We do not even need statistics to know that billions more people are gainfully and productively employed now than in the past when we had fewer machines and a lower level of technology.
However, in the interests of providing a recent example let’s look at the rise of ATMs. These machines were predicted to throw bank tellers out of work for good. In fact, bank employment rose. The money that banks saved on tellers making change allowed them to open many more branches. Tellers morphed into personal bankers. Relieved of the burden of drudge work they evolved to help clients solve more complex problems. True, banking employment has dropped with the arrival of online banking, but we do not yet know what innovations are in store for this industry anymore than we could have for tellers in the 1980s.
Nothing about this process has retarded the ability of humanity to materially prosper, in fact, just the opposite. We must remember what it is that causes material prosperity in the first place: it is the ability to become more productive. Productivity starts with our physical labor. What then makes labor possible? Initially our brawn, simple manual effort. As we know from history that does not get us far by way of a standard of living. To raise humanity’s condition labor needs to be more productive. In fact, increased productivity is the only means by which humanity can increase its standard of living and become materially wealthier. As a species, we can only consume what we produce, so we must produce more to become wealthier, that is raise our level of productivity. We must produce more with the same or less effort to do this. How then, given the same 168 hours in a week and humanity’s physical abilities capped, can we produce more?
Tools are the answer, of course. If we have more and better tools then we can produce more and better things. Economics gives a fancy name to these tools, capital. The more capital we have the more we can produce. The more we produce the more we can consume. Voila, the wealthier we are.
So, where does the capital come from? From savings. We must defer some of our consumption to build tools that will allow us to produce more later. The foundation, then, of all material wealth is savings.
So, as we can logically see the wellsprings of wealth come from savings which produces more and better tools which allow us to produce more and therefore consume more. How is this process best facilitated? Not surprisingly, I am taking the position that an unhampered marketplace is the best facilitator of this process. Again, simple logic is our best guide. Who would we think can do this better? A profit-seeking entrepreneur or a vote-seeking politician? The political process will invariably misallocate resources and waste capital (tools). It’s not that profit seekers never make mistakes and lose capital, but they pay a marketplace penalty when this happens, unlike politicians and bureaucrats. A large part of this process is the development of automation and machinery to make human labor more productive.
Along with this vast increase in employment is the fact that machines have made work easier and safer. The burdensome, backbreaking labor that marked most of humanity’s existence has been greatly reduced. Along with that, the incidence of job injuries is also much lower than in the past. The information from the peer reviewed Injury Prevention shows a dramatic reduction in workplace injuries across a variety of industrial sectors. One obvious reason is the increase in automation.
Since the Beginning
This is but part of a process that has dramatically enriched all those parts of the globe that have embraced liberalized markets. A brief history is in order.
Let’s start this history at the time humans first started to farm and settle in some type of community. Prior to that humans were simply hunter-gatherers living at the edge of subsistence. This takes us back to about 10,000—8000 B.C. The following runs us until about 1750 A.D. and holds true for about 80+% of the human population.
So, you are born. Let’s say in a group. Look to your right; look to your left; one of you is not making it to year one. Human infant mortality rates during this period hovered between 25-35% and that about half of all children died before making it to puberty. If you made it out of puberty you could expect to live, on average, until about the age of 50.
What would you be doing with yourself during these few decades upon the Earth? You would be a farmer. Not in any sense that we think of farming today but as in mostly a subsistence farmer, making just enough to feed yourself and your family. Some farms during some parts of history produced enough surplus to feed those in urban areas but this was always subject to the vagaries of nature as disease and famine would often cause crops to fail and the cities to empty (not to mention the effects of war).
Most people never traveled more than 20 miles from the small village or tribal encampment they called home, never seeing a city. They never saw a king, fought in a battle, read a book, looked upon any artwork or listened to a teacher lecture. They did see the taxman regularly enough though. Taxes were mostly in the form of requisitioned crops.
This rather bleak description holds true whether we are talking about ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India or China. Consider that all that we study regarding human history: the battles, court intrigues, rise and fall of empires, and on and on, is the work of less than 20% of the human population. It remained the case for about 11,750 years until, as I said, about 1750 A.D.
Hmmm, what happened around 1750 to change all of this? Change absolutely arrived around this time as this chart shows:
Chart by Human Progress
There was a massive upward thrust in human well-being. This was not just in dollars but in every relevant metric of human progress as this series of charts shows. People moved massively off the farms and their subsistence living and their health and longevity increased as well. Life expectancy went from about 30 years in the mid-18th century to over 70 globally today, as this chart shows:
Chart by Our World in Data
We should welcome the newest technology as a help to humanity the way the first humans welcomed the wheel. The only thing that will strip us of our humanity is if we choose not to progress and make this a better, wealthier, safer, and more comfortable world in which to live. Machines help us to become materially richer, and if I must choose between richer or poorer, I choose richer…every single time.
So, what happened? The great battle, as the economist/historian Murray Rothbard has put it is between power (government) and market (voluntary cooperation). For most of human history power has been dominant. We saw brief times when power was relatively diminished, compared to commercial freedom, and a sort of flowering of humanity occurred; ancient Greece, at times in Rome, ancient Persia (to a degree), China at times, but on the whole it was power that remained dominant and the wars and conflicts in civilization were between one power and another.
However, by the mid-18th century the idea began to take hold that perhaps people should govern themselves. That they should be allowed to keep the fruits of their labor, that they should not be burdened with excessive taxation and that allowing the free exchange of goods was a beneficial and righteous thing. In short, humanity (particularly the West) began to limit government and reduce its scope. This continued, unevenly to be sure, for about 150 years. Since then, it has been a back and forth struggle as power has tried to reassert itself since about 1900 (particularly in the West). It was this intellectual change which laid the basis for the Industrial Revolution that lifted humanity from the muck. Even the left acknowledges that this was a period of laissez faire by how much they denounce it. It is harder to denounce the results.
In short, all this is because humanity allowed itself to adapt, innovate and change. For a while anyway, humanity ceased to fear the future.
Every. Single. Time.
The fact is that technology and an increased level of per capita capital invested always lowers costs and expands markets…always. That is, if it is allowed to. One of the great economic mistakes that anti-technologists make is to assume that there is a fixed amount of work for humans to do. Nonsense. When we advance to being able to perform a set of jobs more efficiently, or by machine, we shift that human effort to another task that we have on our list of goods and services. How long is that list? It is infinite, that’s how long. We are so far down the list already that even the framers of the constitution could not have imagined it. Simply because we cannot imagine what will land on the list in the future is no reason to short circuit that future.
Take the case of AI video creation. Many in the movie business are terrified of the prospect of AI-assisted, or wholly AI made films. Yet, why should we fear this? If this technology dramatically lowers costs (and it will) this is unquestionably good. Think how many more stories can be told with a much lower cost structure. Think how many more diverse voices can be heard telling a far greater variety of stories.
This would represent a huge expansion of the market for such content. Expanding markets and creating unforeseen opportunities is always what this kind of progress brings to humanity. Always!
The real risk is not allowing humanity to progress. Allowing the technological troglodytes to stop the development of AI, or any other technology is to close off society and consign ourselves to stasis. Within the general progress of humanity since the dawn of civilization, and even since the industrial revolution, there have been societies that chose this path. Poverty was the result of that choice. The biggest risk of the creation of powerful new technologies is letting them get into the hands of the government. That has also been a risk that has been with humanity from the beginning.
The Terminator Thesis
All of this consternation and hand wringing is crap. First, let us dispense with the hoary notion that machines are “bad”. The concepts of good and bad are contingent upon moral agency. You must have a choice to make in order for your actions to be considered as good or bad. Most assuredly machines are not moral agents, as they have no choice. They are programmed, told what to do, period, full stop. Yes, AI can learn. That is what it is programmed to do. It can interact in a more human-like fashion. That is what it is programmed to do. Mostly what ChatGPT, Claude, and the like do is very quickly draw on what they learned during training, then synthesize an answer. In short, it mirrors human behavior, and it is often trained on all manner of garbage out on the web. Every racist, homophobic, conspiratorial lunacy is available for AI to “synthesize” into an answer. To be fair this is the raw “pretraining” phase before learning from human feedback. That only strengthens the point that humans are in control of this process—for good or ill. Again, it seems the threat is exaggerated.
To suggest that we face some sort of Terminator type risk is to first suggest that machines will gain consciousness, or subjective feeling. That is, that they will become human. This is utter fantasy. This article from this year makes a strong case (although not without controversy) against this argument. Machines will, as always, do what they are programmed to do, no matter how intelligent they appear to be.
Now to be evenhanded the argument is made that AI will pursue goals that can do great damage to humanity. This is not a failing of the software; it is a failing of the uses to which that software is put. If humans program something to do damage then it likely will. This has been true of technology from the beginning. It is true of the existential threat that nuclear weapons pose to humanity. This is a human failing not a technological one. Legal guardrails and human systems can be erected that can mitigate and disincentivize these risks the way we do with similar risks now. Unintended outcomes, like deliberate misuse, can be dealt with by continued feedback, testing, and market discipline, which is how previous technology dealt with the gap between what a thing was designed to do and what it actually did.
This Time is Not Different
Along with the age-old cry of “machines are bad” is the second oldest bit of claptrap, “this time is different”. No, it is not. AI has great potential. As I indicated above, it has a ways to go before it makes a dramatic impact, but we should welcome and work toward that dramatic impact. Yes, AI will eliminate some jobs, the way machines in the past have done. We should not minimize the dislocation that those jobholders will experience. Yet, as seems likely, AI will allow for the creation of new and different types of work that humans can and will perform, thus creating more goods and services for humans to enjoy.
This fallacy is one based upon ignoring the law of comparative advantage. The fear is always that some other nation or company will be better at producing everything. This misses the point. Comparative advantage does not require humans to be better at anything than machines. It only matters that machine capacity is finite (like any economic good) and must be allocated to its highest valued uses. This will always leave room for human labor at some price.
This is not to ignore the warning I stated in Part II of this series. The distortions in the allocation of scarce capital that government subsidies create will likely result in the wasting of scarce resources. That a particular technology is good does not mean that we can’t get ahead of ourselves in its promotion, via government policy. This happened to the railroads in the U.S. and that is the best analogy to what may happen here. Richard White’s Railroaded documents how that capital was wasted.
Conclusions
There are those in the Christian community who would claim I am suggesting the worship of technology and wealth. This is false. There is no King but Christ. All I am saying is that the best response to the Gospel is to treat all people the way we wish to be treated which means a stateless society (as an ideal) that allows people agency to respond to the Gospel the way their consciences are informed. This is exactly how Jesus left it with people (such as the rich young ruler) that chose to put something else before God.
This allows for the best creation of a level of material comfort and security that bestows the maximum human dignity upon all God’s children. God will know in our hearts whether we have placed mammon, or some technological process before Him.
Yes, we will have challenges ahead. Humanity always does. Yes, some will take the new technology and do harm to others with it (first on that list is government). Humanity always has. This is no reason to freeze our development. Or would we have been better off without that wheel simply because someone was going to run someone else over with it? The problems of a fallen humanity will always be with us, until the end of the age. However, maybe if we can create a world of safer, more interesting, and more comfortable work, we can tamp down the worst impulses of humanity. Freaking out about machines and using force to stifle needed innovation seems likely to stoke up those worst instincts.
If we move forward, as God intends us to, loving one another the way He loves us, and embracing the Golden Rule, in response to His gifts, then we can have that better world that taps into the deepest of human desires. We can save lives, make them safer, more comfortable and wealthier. Yet, we can only do this if we have faith enough in God to use the brains He gave us to not retreat and regress into fear.
Praise Be to God
