On May 7, research organization MITRE announced the creation of a new supercomputing Federal AI Sandbox powered by tech giant NVIDIA, a renowned leader in artificial intelligence (AI) development.
This Sandbox initiative is poised to revolutionize the government's AI capabilities, enhancing a spectrum of public services from transportation to health care to cybersecurity. Access to an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD marks a significant leap forward for federal AI integration.
A number of critics remain skeptical when it comes to the possibility of advancing responsible AI. One popular point of criticism paraded by skeptics is that AI will displace human workers. While it is true that AI will lead to job losses in some sectors, what today's critics don't understand is that this same warning was promulgated against previous groundbreaking technologies that have since revolutionized—and improved—the way we work.
In his 1930 essay, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, leading British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote, "We are being afflicted with a new disease" called technological unemployment. "This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour."
Keynes was referring to the technical improvements in transport and manufacturing during that period. By 1925, factory output per capita had surged by 40 percent compared to 1919. This rapid increase in productivity, largely driven by innovations such as the moving assembly line, prompted concerns among contemporary observers about the potential displacement of an entire generation of workers. These technological advancements were also making their way into agriculture and food production through the introduction of mechanized tractors and harvesters—a reality Keynes was not too fond of. "For the moment the very rapidity of these changes is hurting us and bringing difficult problems to solve," he said.
Concerns about automation continued through the mid-twentieth century.
In his 1950 bestseller, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, sociologist David Riesman warned against the perils of an automated society with excess leisure time, cautioning that without meaningful engagement, individuals may struggle to find fulfillment and purpose in their lives. Riesman was responding to what he perceived as an increasingly atomized and alienated post-war America.
Ten years later, Paul Goodman's Growing up Absurd explored the consequences of technological progress on those at the bottom of the income pyramid. Goodman was particularly concerned about the fate of unskilled, low-wage workers if automation was permitted to advance unchecked.
"The poorly paying unskilled jobs have diminished. It is here that simple automation (e.g. sweeping the floor in a factory) is allowed full development" and those at the bottom of the social strata tend to "fall out" of the workforce, Goodman warned. The culprit at the time? Technologies like automated machinery in factories and early computing systems. These innovations threatened to replace human labor with machines, leading to significant job displacement among the least skilled workers.
Similarly, when VisiCalc, the world's first electronic spreadsheet program, launched in 1979, doomsday predictions about how computer spreadsheets would lead to widespread unemployment in accounting were all the rage. Critics feared that the efficiency brought by tools like VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 would render many clerical and accounting jobs obsolete.
In fact, the opposite happened. The number of jobs in the sector actually grew. Accountants weren't just limited to simple arithmetic but began to take on dynamic new tasks that transformed the industry, like predictive modeling. With the advent of spreadsheets making systematic tracking easier, prompting their widespread adoption across various professions that had previously not considered them necessary, accountants became more valuable.
In the same vein, AI has the power to transform—and potentially disrupt—a host of industries. However, as history has shown, concerns about the extent to which new technologies will wipe out entire industries tend to be wildly exaggerated. From Amazon's Alexa to ChatGPT, AI is too integrated in our everyday lives to simply go away or become irrelevant. Recognizing this reality, our leaders must adopt a proactive stance to effectively mitigate the more serious risks associated with AI, like data breaches and AI hallucinations.
By ensuring America stays at the forefront of innovation and competitiveness in the global landscape, NVIDIA's collaboration with the White House is a right step in that direction.
Nathalie Voit is a Young Voices contributor and an alumni of the University of Florida. Her writing regularly appears on C3 Solutions.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
