The AI boom holds both utopian and dystopian possibilities that we may not yet be prepared for.
Changes wrought by new technologies are often regarded with suspicion in their time. Yet market economies have consistently transformed techno-shocks into long-term advantages for a wide swathe of society. This was true with electricity, the advent of the conveyor belt and even the first wave of the IT revolution. In most advanced economies, for example, armies of office workers have shrunk as a casualty of the computer revolution that began in the late 1960s. In 2017, few would reject the benefits that have arisen from eliminating rote tasks, such as filing and tapping out letters on temperamental typewriters.
