It's Lost On Peggy Noonan That Societies Don't Plan Progress

Jay Leno was ridiculing Jeff Bezos, and Bezos had to take it. It was December 29, 1999.

This was back when Amazon was “Amazon.org.” It was a time when people who held Amazon shares were literally ridiculed for owning them. Don’t you know, Amazon can’t make a profit!

The Bezos clip came to mind while Reading Peggy Noonan’s latest plea to wake us up to the perilous AI future she seemingly sees so clearly. Leno was laughing at Bezos, and all Bezos could do was smile uncomfortably. He was reasonably confident about Amazon’s future, but how to express confidence when “everyone” knows you’re never going to make a profit?

Leno laughing at Bezos on The Tonight Show is but one answer to Noonan’s complaint in her latest Wall Street Journal piece that “Our society, our country, never decided to ‘do’ AI.” Noonan claims that history will be “perplexed” by the latter. Perhaps not. See Bezos.

No one was clamoring for the internet or Amazon when the 1990s dawned, or even in 1999 when an overwhelming majority of commercial transactions were still completed when the postman delivered the check in the mail. If “society” had wanted the Internet, then it’s a near certainty we’ve never heard of Amazon. Walmart would have acquired it in its infancy, or put it out of business.

It bothers Noonan that the “people had no say” in “something so big,” but the big things by Noonan’s description always reach us unexpectedly. There’s nothing big or epochal in what’s already known.

Implied in Noonan’s comment that “our country” never decided to “do” AI is that government never had a say. Well, of course not. And that’s not a critique of government. It’s just a comment that government is merely people, and the same people who didn’t know they wanted the internet had no clue about AI.

Lest Noonan forget, the Department of Justice began its antitrust suit against Google and its Chrome browser on October 20, 2020. The date is relevant because OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. Stop and contemplate just how primitive a search on Google was in October of 2020 relative to October of 2026.

Despite this, the DOJ’s lawsuit against Google and Chrome is ongoing. What could government offer to AI’s greatest minds?

Noonan has for weeks written haughtily about so few seeing the bleak future that she does. She wants it both ways. She’s positioning herself as Cassandra for the history books that may not exist. Apparently, investors are directing trillions to entrepreneurs with designs on exterminating them? It’s a question Noonan isn’t asking.

Instead, she complains that “The president and those who talk in his ear are so careless, so deaf” to AI’s potential horrors. She’s shooting barreled fish yet again with her attacks on Trump for not agreeing with her, but claims there’s a reason those same “careless” and “deaf” people don’t agree.

She cites “secret documents” featured in the Washington Post, and that reveal the donors to Trump’s ballroom: Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Palantir, Meta, etc. In the latter, Noonan sees “full steam ahead” from the White House as being about money, safety be damned. Actually, it should make Noonan feel safe. Money is ruthless

Stock markets relentlessly price the various knowns, unknowns, and catastrophe scenarios. Far from a snapshot of the present, money is a skeptical look ahead. And while tomorrow in the stock market is another country, that’s precisely the point. Since markets anticipate, they’ll correct to Noonan’s assessment of AI’s horrors long before the actual AI damage can be done. If Peggy Noonan is right, the markets will tell us.

Originally published on Real Clear Markets.