To Ease His AI Worries, Bill Gates Should Meet Karl Ravech
“I still have difficulty walking in the door and believing I work here.” That's Karl Ravech, in a 1993 interview with the Syracuse Post-Standard.
Ravech had recently taken a job with ESPN, which meant he was having enormous amounts of fun while working. If the aim of most individuals is to do for work what they would gladly do for free, then Ravech hit the proverbial Bull’s Eye.
The view here is that Bill Gates would be better for knowing Ravech’s story. If so, Gates might temper his expressed skepticism about the rise of artificial intelligence (AI).
Gates is calling for government regulation of the new AI era since it’s moving so fast, and since its impact will be felt in a matter of years over many generations. Yet as Gates’s own description of AI’s fast pace indicates, regulation of it will bring new meaning to backward-looking governmental oversight.
Furthermore, the speed with which AI’s impact will be felt is a feature of it, not a bug. To see why we pivot to Henry Ford, on whose shoulders Gates eventually stood.
Ford came up in a world in which most individuals farmed all their existence, six days a week from dawn to dusk, whether they liked it or not. Ford couldn’t stand the work. He felt “there was too much hard work connected with farming.” He eventually fixed what was gravely wrong with working conditions.
Ford’s factories at his eponymous car company made it possible for people to divide assembly up with others, and in doing just that, focus on the work most suited to them individually. Is it any wonder that ambitious people from around the world rushed to Detroit? Specialized workers make more money. In Ford’s words, “The methods of mass production enable the worker to earn more and thus have more.”
Consider what Ford achieved with Gates’s laments about AI in mind. Gates fears rapid change while lamenting that “Many jobs will disappear forever,” but his analysis ignores that work for the sake of work is brutal. Farms provided endless work, which was the problem. Thank goodness tractors, fertilizer, and “methods of mass production” freed people from such a miserable existence.
Just the same, thank goodness for AI and the data centers that will be the work equivalent of literally billions and trillions of hands and minds entering the global workforce. The automation of so much production and thought will create exponentially happier, more industrious, and better paid workers freed from doing what they must so that they can do what they can’t not do.
See Karl Ravech yet again. In 1993, he was able to work at a place (ESPN) where everyone was having fun. Not so if job-searching in 1883: a tragic lack of technology would have almost certainly consigned him to a life of work defined by endless drudgery, most likely on a farm.
That’s why Gates would prosper from knowing or knowing about Ravech. Ravech would be a reminder to Gates of what he already knows, that the job-destroying attributes of technology are invariably compassionate precisely because the prosperity they embody frees people from doing what they have to do.
There’s always work. It’s just that it’s much better when machines are doing and thinking for us.
Last week, Ravech called his last Little League World Series for ESPN, and did so even though the network had recently laid him off. There’s a lesson in this for Gates, and it’s about how we'll all get to be the 1993 Karl Ravech if AI lives up to what has Gates so worried.
Originally published on Real Clear Markets.