If you listen to the loudest voices in the artificial intelligence debate, you would think America is on the brink of an apocalypse and that “Terminator”-style robots are hunting humans, rogue computers are turning on their creators like Hal in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” mass layoffs are rampant and data centers are destroying all of our small towns.
But three years after ChatGPT was first introduced, the new normal of life with AI so far is a lot less dire and a lot more convenient.
The technology has enabled medical professionals to spend more time with their patients, allowed small business owners to expand more quickly and hire more employees and helped entrepreneurs promote their endeavors.
That is the emerging picture from people I spoke with across the country, and it’s also reflected in the data. Google’s recent ATLAS study of 15 million Gemini users found AI is primarily used as a complement to work and doesn’t replace human work.
There are, of course, legitimate concerns about privacy, misinformation and whether AI might be fueling some people’s delusions — but there is also a great danger in refusing to adopt the most important technology of the modern age.
Many tech executives I spoke with suggested the real fear is not getting replaced by AI but rather getting replaced by someone who knows how to use AI.
That’s also how Ita Reyes, who runs Ita Yoga Studio in Ann Arbor, Mich., sees it.
“When the internet showed up … if you didn’t jump on it you were left out,” Reyes, who also manages a hardware store with her husband, told me. “This is the same exact turning-point moment … If you don’t jump into this wagon, you’re going to be left behind … It is such a simple, simple tool that can do so much. Why would you not give that to yourself and to your business?”
Reyes credits her Meta glasses, which can record footage and upload her photos, with making it easier to promote her studio.
“As soon as those came out, I started taking content with them … for my social media.”
Another husband-and-wife team, TJ and Kayce Weed, praised Meta’s AI for helping them to easily amp up their marketing and social media for their coffeeshops in northeastern Louisiana. Using the high-tech tools, they’ve been able to bring in more revenue and focus on expansion. No one has lost their job — quite the opposite in fact.
“We have actually hired more people because we have gotten busier. So I’m able to be in the background more and handle more business aspects and actually be a business owner,” said Kayce, who has used AI to optimize and proofread social media posts.
TJ has used the tech to run the numbers on the backend. “[I’m] looking at our profit margins, and do we need to adjust pricing, and letting AI kind of like loop through it.”
Charlotte Coates, a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner based in Dallas, is already seeing AI reshape the medical landscape in a way that gives clinicians more time to focus on patients.
“Using AI in the last two years has significantly reduced administrative overhead,” said Coates, the Founding Clinical Lead at Legion Health, a virtual health clinic. “It lets me refocus on what I think is core to the role — developing a treatment plan, focusing on patients.”
For new patients, especially those arriving with multiple records, AI helps her quickly figure out what is going on. “A LLM reads through documentation and forms and questions and gives a summary,” she explained.
Besides providing benefits to small businesses and those that work for them, AI is also creating thousands of new jobs to build its physical infrastructure. Electricians, welders, construction workers, and technicians are all in demand to build the data centers and their power systems and cooling networks.
Companies like Meta and Google are now spending tens of millions — $115 million and $50 million, respectively, this year alone — to train electricians, welders, and other skilled trades workers. The AI boom depends on physical infrastructure that only these workers can build.
Residents in towns willing to host that infrastructure are also seeing the upside.
In Louisiana’s rural Richland Parish, teachers are receiving bonuses of more than $50,000 this year after local sales-tax revenue more than doubled thanks to construction of Meta’s massive Hyperion data center. A town with just 20,000 people has already collected more than $40M in sales and use taxes in the first nine months of the fiscal year thanks to embracing data centers.
That is the story Meta is telling. Last week the company launched its “The Future is for Everyone” campaign, which highlights stories like those of Reyes and the Weeds — ordinary people using AI to build their businesses and share in the benefits of the new technology.
Dina Powell McCormick, Meta’s president and vice chairman, has been one of the most visible AI optimists. “By working together, we can make this moment transformational for humanity. The future can be for everyone.”
Still, some of the masterminds behind the tech are stuck in a doom-and-gloom mindset.
Open AI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei both signed a 2023 statement declaring that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Elon Musk has called Artificial General Intelligence a “significantly higher risk than nuclear weapons.”
Of course, these titans have done so while spending billion to develop the systems faster, raising questions about why they’re simultaneously trying to terrify people while still moving forward with the technology.
To be sure, some disruption is inevitable. Young workers may face new barriers in certain entry-level roles and of course no one knows how the technology may evolve. Meta has indeed had widely publicized layoffs, where 8,000 employees (roughly 10% of its workforce) got pink slips. But reports suggested some of that was to remove jobs that were redundant, with or without AI.
But so far, mass displacement simply is not happening.
AI is both skill-biased and labor-augmenting. It “relies on humans in the loop to direct and evaluate the most complex work” and “broadens the scope of what people can accomplish,” Anthropic’s head of economics, Peter McCrory, wrote in a recent analysis.
That view is echoed in broader surveys. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report projects 170 million new roles created versus 92 million displaced by 2030 — a net gain of roughly 78 million jobs.
And we have seen this movie before.
When electricity first arrived, critics feared electrocution, fires, job losses and social disruption. Instead, it transformed homes, cities, medicine and industry — creating huge productivity gains and entirely new forms of work and leisure.
It is legitimate to ask hard questions about AI. It is even legitimate to fear the unknown. But it’s also legitimate to fear what happens when people won’t adopt it.
