The Hidden Truth About AI That No One Wants You to Choose Sides On

Steven Levy, the longtime editor of Wired, edited one of my earliest articles. In it, I explored historical moral panics that came with emerging technologies: the radio would destroy intelligence as fewer people would read newspapers; the telephone would destroy personal relationships as people wouldn’t spend time together in person; social media would further push us into isolation and destroy meaningful connections.

We’re facing a similar moral panic today surrounding artificial intelligence. The fear stems from the near-limitless power and revenue of tech companies at the expense of stolen work and potential job losses. What I failed to address in that original article nearly 15 years ago is that both sides of the argument can be true.

• The radio did lead to a decline in reading newspapers while also opening up fresh forms of sharing news and entertainment.
• The telephone did lead to teenagers spending more time talking on the phone than in person, while also connecting people across vast distances in a previously cost-prohibitive way.
• Social media did lead to fewer in-person connections and the rise of the loneliness epidemic, while also providing expanded access to people and information.
• Likewise, AI uses stolen data and positively reframes workflows and productivity in previously unimaginable ways.

These are all accurate statements, and none of them are mutually exclusive. Yet, too much of the conversation around AI is that both cannot be true: either AI is bad and no one should use it, or AI is good and everyone should use it. This binary is the wrong framing and misses the nuances surrounding AI — after all, AI is not an all-or-nothing choice.

Today, I want to look at the three biggest problems I see with the current AI discourse:

1. The inability to hold opposing viewpoints simultaneously,
2. The US-centric, fear-based thinking, and
3. The threat of job losses.

I.