To The Reader’s Forum:

“The world goes along only one road — the road of progress.” -Charles Kettering, American businessman, 1929.

The rhetoric is everywhere: AI is an “inevitable” part of modern life, and people who question the truth of this phrase are reactionaries clinging to “the past.” However, separating ourselves so neatly from our own history creates a false sense of immunity from repeating it.

Artificial intelligence will lessen mental strain, shorten labor times, and increase productivity: so the claim goes. Yet a growing body of scientific studies tells us that rather than supplementing our skills, dependence on AI software such as ChatGPT to perform tasks like research and writing for us causes the off-loaded skills to atrophy.

It’s job-market economics 101 that labor which is both less-skilled and widely available necessarily becomes cheap. Wealthy corporations may reassure us that AI will make work easier. But consider the 19th- and 20th-century industrialized production boom that, instead of shortening workdays, accelerated consumerism. With the advent of AI, what incentive do companies gain to benevolently look after their employees’ welfare, rather than paying less while expecting greater results?

Furthermore, at what point in history has social progress ever been achieved by an uneducated majority class lacking in knowledgeable confidence, whose labor is exploitable and who depend on the elite few to provide for them: in this case, the resource they need to function at minimal capability?

Mass implementation of AI’s data centers will create jobs, we are told; which might be true in the short-term sense. However, the impact we have seen within AI’s rapid expansion period gives us a look at what we stand to exchange in return, as data centers already overuse resources, including energy, land space, and drinkable water.

Nor are the involved companies as “local” as they profess to be. Despite its regional-sounding label, Four Winds of Lake Erie, LLC, is owned by Weed, Inc., which is based in Arizona and overseas. In dismissal of residents’ heated opposition, Weed, Inc. intends to push through a data center near the lake. It’s hard to imagine a less progressive action plan than trading communities’ welfare for what amounts to out-of-state executives’ pocket change.

No development can be evaluated on its catchy slogans, or attractive but short-term perks. In terms of AI, the chant of progress sounds not as a call to a brighter future, but antiquated instead: resembling nothing so much as a 1950s advertising jingle: “It’s New!”

Rachel Anderson

Kennedy