We Can't Know Our A.I. Future if We Don't Study It

The Industrial Revolution was the birthplace of social science as we know it. Entire disciplines such as sociology, political science and economics came into being to analyze enormous social challenges and guide public debate on how to respond. Other social sciences such as psychology and cognitive science followed to study closely how the effects of this revolution were changing us at the individual level. As we face a new revolution ushered in by artificial intelligence, these disciplines are poorly situated to provide guidance. The Trump administration has slashed federal funding for the social and behavioral sciences, while private funding for certain A.I.-related work has skyrocketed. The result is that many social scientists have left academia and traditional research institutions for A.I. firms that are effectively building out their own social science programs — which threaten to favor the ambitions of A.I.'s creators over the public's interests. To navigate the shock waves of A.I., we must restore social science research as an enterprise that starts from the public interest. Nineteenth-century industrialization led to a series of huge social upheavals in which people left agrarian lives in the countryside for jobs in cities. Subjects were increasingly becoming citizens who could vote and influence policy to some degree and were educated in government-funded schools. Not all of this was pretty. Workers endured terrible living conditions, while rapidly growing cities became cesspits of crime and disease. Politics was ravaged by conflict between those who wanted political and economic revolution and those who called for violent repression of these movements. Liberals, socialists and conservatives worried that these tensions would tear society apart. The fear that machines were wrecking society created political demand for reliable information on what was happening on the ground and how people were living. In Britain, where the Industrial Revolution began, the journalist Henry Mayhew calculated that hundreds of Londoners made their living gathering bones, rags and cigar ends from the street, as well as dog excrement for tanneries. Commissions of inquiry and censuses followed and gathered information on working conditions and education. Politicians, lawyers and bureaucrats debated whether allowing poor people to vote would lead to disaster. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.