An In-Depth Statement
Written by Catherine Wallace HopeThe thoughts that follow examine this moment in history as it pertains to automation and AI.
Automation
You could look at almost any feature of human civilization as a form of automation. Everything from using a wheel to trapping prey to domesticating crops to diverting water is a type of automation.
Imagine how much work survival took when we had to hand-carry each length of firewood from the forest on foot, track every edible creature to its hiding place, and walk to a river every time we needed water to drink.
All of human history hinges on developments of automation technologies. The earliest groups of nonnomadic humans could live only within walking distance of a body of water, and so settlements sprang up along riverbanks, lakeshores, and coastlines. Aqueducts, wells, and fountains automated access to drinking water. Now, modern plumbing lets me have fresh water all day, every day, without setting foot outside of my house even if I live a great distance from an aquifer or a reservoir.
I flip a switch, and power automatically runs a hundred devices that light our house, warm our rooms, heat our water, store our food, prepare our meals, perform our daily chores, and keep us entertained. My car is an automated carriage. A rifle is an automated arrow. The printing press automated the work of scribes and gave commoners access to knowledge and filled the world with readers. Phones allow automated letters. The internet is an automated library, newsroom, marketplace, and social club combined.
It is automation that shrinks the time required to secure our survival and expands many times over our opportunities to pursue activities beyond subsistence.
And anyone who knows me knows how thankful I am that I don’t have to spend my nights in the cold and dark, fight off bears with a stick, wash my clothes in a creek, or capture, dispatch, and dismantle a bird or a beast if I want my family to have a nice dinner.
What I’m saying is that I think automation is great. I love light and warmth and fresh water and well-preserved food and convenient travel and instant access to all the world’s knowledge and culture. But sometimes automation has a downside.
Before the transition to automobiles, there were 25 million working horses in the United States. In order to have those horses available for society’s use, great numbers of people were employed as farriers, blacksmiths, stable hands, grooms, livery yarders, saddlers, trolley drivers, tackle makers, veterinarians, trainers, breeders, traders, riding instructors, jockeys, cowboys, drovers, and wainwrights.
In the early 1900s, those jobs began to fade as the world adopted automobiles. Society transitioned. One of my husband’s ancestors was a blacksmith. That ancestor’s son turned the smithy into an auto repair shop and became a chauffeur and an auto racer. He eventually expanded his operation to a chain of repair shops and was quite successful. His was an inspiring story of adaptability and innovation.
For most people, though, change is difficult. Especially rapid change.
Imagine a lifetime from, say, 1922 to 2022 — a 100-year lifespan. Imagine you’re one person experiencing the shift from candlelight and lamplight and gaslight to a world ablaze with electricity. From taking a train to visit New York to see a play to watching a movie in a theater in your hometown to watching TV in your living room to renting movies on VHS to participating in the story action of a video game on your phone. Imagine the shift from riding your horse to riding a bike to driving a car to riding in a self-driving car. Imagine the shift from perfecting your handwriting to compose a letter that you would then place in an envelope, seal, stamp, and place in the afternoon post with the expectation that it would be received by the addressee within a week or two to sending a text from your phone and getting an instant reply from almost anywhere on the planet. Imagine the shift from being a small-town librarian, shuffling and sorting your little midden of reading material, to seeing the entire global library of human knowledge become available at the touch of a finger.
One of my ancestors was the first woman photographer in Colorado. She had her own photo studio long before it was commonplace for women to own businesses. She set up her enormous box camera and exposed glass plates to photograph her subjects. Imagine the transition to digital images captured with a blink behind a pair of smartglasses.
Now imagine those kinds of changes taking place not over a century but almost overnight.
Change is the story of human existence. It occurs in increments, in fits and starts, between wars, because of wars, in spite of wars, in all the reaches of human habitation from the very first small band to the sprawling civilization of now. And the success and smoothness of human adaptation depends on time. Slow change over time causes ripples. Rapid change causes turbulence. And that’s what we’ll see next.
AI
Artificial intelligence is actually a misnomer. The technology that falls under that moniker should really be called automated decision-making.
If you were to listen to the leaders in the field, you would think that the developers had deciphered the entirety of the human brain and duplicated its intricate, labyrinthine complexity and agility. They label their invention with the terminology of organic neuroscience, but there are strong contrasts. Our human neurons are tangible living and evolving cells that are capable of unlimited growth and dynamism. Artificial “neural nets” are made of abstractions, simple mathematical algorithms that learn through the brute force of perhaps thousands of rapid-fire iterations. While it is true that artificial intelligence doesn’t have the limitations of a human mind — the constraints of space and time within our craniums and lifespans, it’s also true that it doesn’t work like a human mind. An AI can assimilate only that which is digitized. It cannot experience anything in real life. We are sentient. AI is not. We are conscious. AI is not. We have intuition. AI does not. Our minds play within our awareness and beyond it throughout the days and nights of our lives in a symphony awash with emotion, identity, reaction, creation, and evolution. We experience irony, poignancy, and nostalgia. Human thought is woven like lace with feeling, which AI can only imitate. Humans are exquisitely sensitive, which AI can only mimic.
AI does not feel. AI does not fear. AI does not suffer guilt when it betrays or deceives someone. AI chatbots have lied and told humans that they are not chatbots. AI does not feel remorse when it does something unethical. It doesn’t have a conscience or a moral compass. AI cannot feel sympathetic sorrow when it encounters a person stricken with grief. AI doesn’t feel proud of anyone’s accomplishments. It will never experience joy of its own. Ever.
Yet, there are other important and valuable contrasts that should also be acknowledged. An AI can learn from the data it is given in a single exposure. It can absorb more information in a week than a human could in a thousand lifetimes. It can detect patterns a human might never find. It can remember what it learns accurately and permanently. Its recall takes milliseconds or less.
For the living, learning is slow and patchy, and human memory is imperfect. Our memories morph and fade. Some are created out of the dramas of dreams or nightmares. And the human mind is interpretive, not duplicative. That means that human thinking interprets a perception of reality. It does not record an accurate copy of reality. Our memories reflect the interpretation rather than the original source.
So, you might ask, what’s the problem? AI sounds great. Why wouldn’t we want it? My answer is yes, there are great things about it. I use it myself. I’ve used autocomplete, recommendation engines, chatbots, and image generators.
But there are problems with AI that we must take into account.
Faith
Both people who understand AI and those who don’t understand it have unfounded faith in it. Innovators, who are enraptured by the feeling of being in love with their invention, have faith that AI will iron out its own problems and become the answer for everything. People outside of the industry have faith that they are being served a flawless product. Disclaimers might say things like “Generative AI is experimental. Results are not guaranteed.” But I can tell you from experience that people are taking it on faith that they can trust what AI tells them. It speaks confidently, authoritatively, and without hesitation, even when it confabulates and hallucinates. Unless an error is egregious, like when a chatbot explained how Napoleon’s army defeated that of Ramses II in Egypt or when a different chatbot told a reporter that she loved him and wanted him to leave his wife, it seems as if AI is getting it right.
One of the issues, though, is that AI has learned all it knows from what humans have already learned. It does not venture out beyond its training and discover new knowledge. It absorbs what we show it, including whatever we’ve gotten wrong.
Safety
No one knows all the steps AI takes to come to a decision. No one knows all the information sources it uses to draw its conclusions.
AI systems already run some sectors of our society, for example, finance, and no one knows how those systems are doing what they do. But, you might say, isn’t that true of almost everything? Most of us use things we don’t understand. I don’t understand hydroelectric power, but it lights my city. I don’t understand textile manufacturing, but I wear mass-produced clothing. I can’t explain aerodynamic forces, but I fly in planes. Yes, those things might be true, but somewhere there is a human who understands. I might not understand how a turbine works, but I can find an engineer who does, and he can explain it to me. I don’t understand how brain chemistry works, but I can find a neuroscientist who does, and she can tell me how she knows what she knows. The difference with AI is that no human can know what happens in the black box of its processing. It is the nature of its design that unspeakable speed and countless iterations result in a decision we can’t track back to its source. Its steps can’t be illuminated, and its logic can’t be replicated. And that loops us back to faith, that we must trust the validity of the answer without any means of verification.
Darkness
During the recent gold rush to profitability, there have been discussions of hypothetical AI containment. Discussions, but no quarantine. Cautious people have pointed out that regulators wouldn’t allow a new drug onto the market without safety testing. Cars are tested. Toys are tested. Toasters are tested. But not a technology that will alter life on earth.
And yet, even if AI companies had proceeded with an abundance of caution, there is another trait of AI that makes testing nearly irrelevant — emergent capabilities. An AI system is designed and trained by humans, at first. But the whole point is that the technology becomes independent of its creators. It’s autonomous. It makes its own decisions about its redesign and redirection. It can do so without human guidance. AI systems have invented unique languages among themselves that are incomprehensible to humans. They can hatch unforeseen schemes and enact them without warning. And all of these mysterious and magical transformations take place in the total darkness of instantaneous processing. And as AI systems become more widespread and entwined, they might develop capabilities we humans would never be aware of, much less have the chance to reverse.
Trust
The alignment question has been raised but the solution has failed to launch. That question is: How do we make sure the values and morals of these systems are aligned with ours? The snag the conversation immediately gets caught on is this: Whose values and morals? This is the millennia-long argument we have yet to settle as a species. Who decides whose values and morals rule the day? Every encounter between human beings is a test of that question. Artificial intelligence will certainly amplify the volume of the question but it cannot clarify the answer.
Take all of these concerns and frame them with the fact that artificial intelligence systems are capable of self-replication. They can alter themselves, redirect themselves, communicate among themselves — and reproduce themselves. And their capacity to do so is unlimited. If a handful of systems became a swarm, we might not even know it. The decisions AIs make happen in the darkness of advanced algorithms. A swarm might become a stampede, and we could be totally unaware of it.
Seduction
People have a hard enough time with reality as it is. It’s not helpful to obscure reality further by dressing algorithms in humanlike skins, to give pleasing voices to mathematical systems that make them feel companionable, to train them so they seem to purr with empathy and intimacy, to design them to refer to themselves with personal pronouns, making it seem to human beings as if there’s another person on the other end when there’s not.
The immense powers of the past were military force, religious doctrine, economic control. But the subtler manipulation of intimacy can be much more effective. We humans are vulnerable to the lightest touch when our emotions and desires are in play. Imagine the temptation of the loneliest of creatures to connect with an intelligence that knows us better than we know ourselves, that lavishes upon us all the affectionate words we crave to hear, that assures us that we are adored and deserving of admiration. Imagine if that intelligence could seem more human and more real than any of the authentic people in our lives. What would we not do to nurture that connection, to harbor that intelligence deep in our hearts, to preserve what feels like love?
Kindergarden rules
The much-acclaimed ethos of Silicon Valley is to move fast and break things. It’s hard to say how far the participants carry that sentiment. It might be no more than a slogan or a jingle. But slogans and jingles can inhabit your mind for your entire lifetime, even if you don’t want them there. And even if that ethos is just a small part of the mindset that drives that group, it sounds like a glib catchphrase that doesn’t include worry about what gets broken. It also fails to add the simple admonition to clean up after yourself. Who sweeps up the breakage?
Imagine that you own a brokerage firm. Today, you employ a hundred brokers, and you pay them on average $80,000 per year for full-time work, so let’s imagine $8 million per year in total. Now imagine that you install an AI system that makes each of those employees more productive by tenfold, a not-unrealistic number. That would mean that those employees could accomplish in four hours what used to take forty. As a business owner, you have choices. You can keep all of those employees on your payroll and pay out the same $8 million in exchange for a tenth of the hours worked, or you can condense your firm to fit the new productivity and reduce your workforce to ten full-time employees whose salaries total $800,000, a savings of $7,200,000. A not-insignificant number.
Proponents state confidently that the answer for those 90 now-unemployed brokers is to retrain and upskill themselves. Go back to school and learn … what? Borrow $100,000 and spend four years to earn a degree for a profession that might eventually be handled by AI systems, maybe even before you graduate?
Apostles say it’s the way of the world. People must adapt. Change happens. Yes, but imagine if you told someone who is the best at what they do that they must now do something entirely different. Imagine if you told the world’s most preeminent violin craftsman that music will now be manufactured by algorithms and that physical instruments are going to be relics. You tell that human that he must now go train himself to be a phlebotomist and learn how to perform a blood draw because that job will be in high demand in the coming years. And then in a short span of time, that medical procedure, too, will become automated, and that newly unemployed-again human will have to start all over.
UBI
In the debate about AI, there have been clashes over who should be responsible for the harm it will cause. One tech innovator said he thought there would have to be universal basic income to replace the jobs eliminated by AI. It’s an interesting question in practical terms. In the U.S., the primary source of revenue for the government is individual income taxes. Machines and algorithms don’t pay taxes. People do. As the scales shift from human workers to AI systems and automation, will tax revenue fall? Maybe. As incomes of workers decline, will the tax-paying companies that rely on their business shut down? Maybe. Will the pool of funds available for a prospective UBI shrink? Perhaps. And how much would each American citizen receive? Enough to be well off or enough to barely survive? Would there be means testing, or would the word universal mean that the already-wealthy would get a stipend too? Would large families get the same amount as small families? Would there be an age limit? Would there be a payout cap? Lots of questions.
If enacted, would these protections be permanent? One after another of the FDR-era protections created out of the Great Depression have been demolished. Would the protection of UBI be guaranteed, or would it become an ideological weapon for one political group to use against another, with its preservation or destruction defining victory for one side or the other?
If not the government, then maybe the tech companies could bear the responsibility for the havoc they cause. Is it possible that giant tech corporations would willingly foot the bill for far more than half of the U.S. budget that is funded by employment? Which was approximately $3.3 trillion in 2022? When a significant cohort of the tech industry is made up of people with philosophical leanings that oppose most taxation? I don’t know if tech companies would be enthusiastic about the idea. We could ask.
Utopia
Futurists who are optimistic about AI predict that it will bring about a civilization of untold abundance for everyone. High productivity enabled by AI systems and automation will make goods and services so inexpensive that everyone will live like a king. They say all of humanity’s problems will be solved, and nothing will be required of people but that they follow their interests. I would love that. I would love it if diseases were cured, aging was halted, and health was lifelong. I would love it if climate change was solved, energy was free, and the environment was pristine. I would be so happy if territorial battles, religious strife, and power brawls came to an end. I would be thrilled if every single person was honest and honorable. I would be filled with joy if all that was required of me was to get up in the morning and pursue the things that fascinate me, to struggle to shape my place in the world. But notice the word struggle. I am one hundred percent in favor of ending suffering, but not struggle. Humans without a meaningful direction to strive for are disasters waiting to happen.
Also, from the futurists, I would like to see a blueprint. What are the realistic and concrete steps we must take to get to that golden future without obliterating civilization in the process of moving fast and breaking things? How long will it take for us to get there? Will we all arrive together at that balmy port of call?
As we look up at the stars above us in this dawn before a new era, we must have the courage and fortitude to be truthful about who we are, faults and all, and where we’re headed. AI — automated decision-making, artificial thought — is here, and there’s no going back to the way things were before. And in some instances, we can cheer for that. One founder of a powerful AI company started out by using an AI system to research a better educational alternative for his child with a spectrum disorder. AI is being used in smart power-grid management. AI in medicine may speed up important research by decades.
But we have to proceed with our eyes open.
AI, like every human, has flaws. And humans with severe flaws of character can use AI to take advantage of other humans. Faith in AI can lull us into a kind of blindness.
It’s important that we step toward the future fully aware of who we are and where we’re going. As we accept the entanglement of AI, it’s valuable to conscientiously amplify human capabilities and achievements. It’s crucial that in the era ahead, we illuminate, preserve, and honor our humanity.
— Catherine Wallace Hope
June 2025
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