In the course of these hebdomadal reports, I have often had occasion to mention Charles Mackay’s 1841 masterpiece Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The title should be inscribed as a talisman somewhere in the homes of the credulous. Mackay’s account of various “moral epidemics”—the South Sea Bubble, Tulipomania, Witch Hunting, etc.—is amusing until one steps back and realizes that we modern sophisticates are just as susceptible to the sorts of “folly and delusion” Mackay anatomizes as was any seventeenth-century Dutchman who mortgaged his house to purchase a single tulip bulb.
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Certain insects undergo periods of dormancy before suddenly erupting in a destructive swarm. So it seems to be with society’s appetite for panic. How long can we go without indulging in the catharsis of a panic? How many society-wide panics have we witnessed in the last few decades? There was the “global cooling” scare when we were warned that a new ice age was upon us. Then there was the “global warming” scare, which is still going strong. “Some say the world will end in fire/Some say in ice.” Al Gore is going with fire. Chicken Little warned about a “population bomb” in which untold multitudes would precipitate mass starvation and lead governments to force sterilization upon their polyphiloprogenitive charges. Now we are being warned about a terrifying birth dearth. I can imagine that, should a new Charles Mackay arise, such episodes would be included in an updated edition of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
I do hope, however, that should a latter-day Charles Mackay be vouchsafed to us, it will be someone with a forensic, not to say cynical, state of mind. For the follies Mackay laid bare were essentially organic, self-generating affairs. Perhaps they were manipulated by unscrupulous actors in their evolution. But they depended for their initial fuel mostly upon those old standbys, human greed and what Mackay called the “imitative and gregarious” instincts of man.
What is novel in many of our current perturbations is the behind-the-scenes interventions of, in many cases, malevolent, foreign actors. The extraordinary popular delusions and madness of the COVID crowds is a case in point. Four or five years on, we have largely forgotten the mask-wearing, social-distancing, economy-blighting harridans of both sexes who acted as the enforcers of the COVID hysteria that China bequeathed us. It will soon be the same as the windmill-championing net-zero lunatics who have worked assiduously to dismantle Western prosperity. Are you surprised that China, Russia, and the Arab states eagerly abet the Greta Thunbergs of the world?
The latest delusional entertainment is the “AI-is-the-Antichrist” brigade. Two things happened last week to make this new panic snap into focus. First, frenetic socialist loudmouth Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar, chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (yes, really), want to impose a moratorium on what they call “artificial superintelligence.” And what if the AI companies of the world ignore them and persist? Sanders and Casar want the state to come down on them with draconian force. “Entities,” they write, “shall be subject to the corporate death penalty, and persons shall be subject to not more than 20 years in prison, which is similar to existing penalties related to unlawfully developing nuclear weapons.”
What’s that chuckling you hear backstage to the left? Why, that would be the tittering of Chairman Xi and his posse of Chinese AI developers. Bernie Sanders is doubtless one of their favorite American politicians.
They are also fond of renegade software engineers like Jacob Coxon, whose story brings me to my second point. Coxon caused a firestorm last week when, after a couple of months, he quit his job at AI giant Anthropic. Why? Because (said he) he was worried that AI might destroy the world. Companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, he said, “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Gee whiz. “These will soon be superhuman systems,” Coxon skirled, “that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”
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Rating-hungry talking heads like Anderson Cooper lapped this up. “If it bleeds, it leads,” you know, and what could be more sanguinary than the impending obliteration of humanity by machines or some souped-up abacus? I loved the CNN chyron: “Ex-Anthropic Researcher: AI could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Remember, this “ex-Anthropic researcher” is a 27-year-old former junior employee who was with the company for some eight weeks. Even the Washington Post recoiled from the panic. “AI Hysteria Jumps the Shark” ran as the title of their editorial. Indeed it does, and WaPo was quite right in noting the link between hysteria, on the one hand, and calls for government intervention and regulation, on the other.
The commentator David Friedberg cut to the chase when he noted that, with the panic over AI, we are “in another trust-the-experts moment” similar to the Karen-maxing moment of COVID. Anthony Fauci told us that COVID would kill everyone unless we had ourselves injected with poison, covered our faces, and stayed indoors by ourselves while the economy shut down and grandma died alone.
Commentators from Elon Musk on down are describing the AI-government-regulation shuffle as a “psy-op.” I think they’re right. A chap called Kevin Bass has followed the trail and connected the dots. It’s an elaborate operation whose end is to hamper American technological innovation.
Two parting thoughts. Some commentators act as if the advent of artificial intelligence is something toto genere novel. It is not. Back in the seventeenth century, Descartes promised that using his new scientific method, man would make himself “the master and possessor of nature.” He envisioned all manner of wondrous things from the development of science-based technology. “Scientia potentia est,” said Francis Bacon, “Knowledge is power.” He was right, and Descartes outlined the rudiments of the techniques that would make good on that promise.
From this perspective, AI is not a departure from mankind’s toiling in the garden of natural knowledge but an extension of that knowledge. It promises breathtaking power, as do the technologies that gave us the internal combustion engine, electric and nuclear energy, nanotechnology, and software, to name just a few items on the menu of technological innovation. These techniques are powerful, which also means they are potentially dangerous. But think of how much they have benefited mankind. Advanced countries around the world are racing to develop and enhance AI. I hope that politically motivated luddites like Bernie Sanders will not stymie America’s capacity to be at the forefront of this inevitable technological progress.
Which brings me to my concluding thought, courtesy of Ronald Reagan. “Government’s view of the economy,” he noted in the mid-1980s, “could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” St. Paul told us that when we were children, we had to do with childish things, but that when we grew up, we should put aside childish things. It is childish to let our enemies define our fears. China and others, abetted by our own administrative state, have been assiduous about doing so. Let us hope we have put such juvenile susceptibilities behind us.
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