It’s Not Fair To Peggy Noonan’s People To Slow AI’s Arrival
Peggy Noonan is asking if we can “Survive” the AI revolution? Her skepticism about Silicon Valley has her predicting that a tendency to isolate will grow with AI, that “It will pull people away from each other, and into friendship with and dependence on itself.” Noonan’s prediction raises a seemingly unrelated question.
Why are Apple shareholders so rich? What a dumb question. They own Apple shares.
The answer is insufficient.
How soon we forget how roundly dismissed the iPhone was ahead of launch in 2007. Remember Palm CEO Ed Colligan? “We’ve struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. The PC guys are not going to just, you know, knock this out. I guarantee it.”
If the iPhone had failed as broadly expected, the ongoing surge in Apple shares would never have happened. And while it turns out Steve Jobs had just a few years to live as is, it’s uncertain that his tenure as CEO would have survived such an expensive failure.
No doubt memories of skepticism about the iPhone are hardly original. But they’re useful as a reminder that nothing about business and technology is obvious. Long-term shareholders of Apple are very rich today because they held on at a time when more than a few experts said to sell.
Remember this as Noonan writes so confidently and negatively about “a slow-motion migrating of human need away from other humans and toward AI, which has deeper hooks than other screen technologies. Television was passive, social media created the illusion of connection and delivered performance, but AI talks to you, remembers, is endlessly available, patient and undemanding.” The bet here is that Noonan’s endless skepticism about technological advance won’t age well. And that’s not just because far more than she’ll admit, the internet, iPhones, and AI vivify the desire of people to connect with each other, and more consistently throughout the day.
What’s most brilliant about technological advance is that it does for us. Henry Ford once said, “I am ignorant about most things.” This self-awareness surely informed the creation of assembly lines whereby people of disparate skills who could create nothing individually could create enormous abundance when their narrow, specialized skills were combined.
Noonan might consider this with AI, in addition to acting more humbly about a future she can’t possibly divine. What if AI is simply an aggregation of trillions more hands and brains in the way that Ford’s factories marshalled the genius of tens of thousands? If so, think of the potential for human flourishing if a technology-driven division of labor frees many more of us from work we must do, and propels us into work we want to do since it uniquely elevates us?
Noonan is already evidence of this. Her path to prosperous writer was paved by technology-driven prosperity far more than she realizes. If so, or if not, she might remember this as she seeks pauses with technology. It’s not just that she can’t possibly know the future she’s trying to save “them” from (she’ll be fine either way), it’s all the work of the future that we can’t possibly know about now, but that will make the people of the future prodigiously happy in the way that Noonan presently is about her own work.
It doesn’t insult Noonan to say she doesn’t know what’s ahead. No one does. What insults her is her desire to slow the arrival of a future that, if the past is any kind of indicator, will launch people into work that will make them even happier than Noonan is about hers.
Originally published on Real Clear Markets.