And here we go, people are starting to get angry.
As you know, I read this era of transition to artificial intelligence in psychological and sociological terms, drawing on the psychiatric theory of trauma. A person put in front of a trauma, or a big change that often plays out as a trauma, goes through the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It’s too big a change and it’s hard to face, and we have to be empathetic about that.
Denial is lasting longer than I expected
The denial phase is lasting far longer than I thought it would. I have it in front of my eyes constantly. It’s the reaction of “but what artificial intelligence? It’s not true that this stuff can program, it’s absolutely nowhere near human intelligence.” People who ignore every factual, physical, and scientific piece of evidence.
I was expecting that at some point the anger phase would arrive, and I’m noticing it now from two signals in particular that I want to share.
Two signals of anger
The first is that in the United States they’re starting to set fire to warehouses and data centers. It’s not only tied to artificial intelligence, but there have already been three or four cases of workers who were laid off, took it badly, and protested in a fairly violent way, which of course I do not support in any way, and set fire to the warehouses. There have been attacks on data centers, and they threw Molotovs, I believe, at Sam Altman’s house. These are the first signs of anger.
The other big signal, on a smaller scale, is that together with Riccardo Dusi and Francesco Ciulla we published a video, which I recommend you watch, where we talked about the future of work in this period of uncertainty. And for the first time the comments under that video are not denial. They’re angry. I’m starting to sense real anger from people who are beginning to accept that this thing is actually happening. More than accepting, they’ve moved past denial and they’re reacting with anger. They’re pissed off.
Why this worries me
As big as this artificial intelligence phenomenon is, this anger phase could take some very dangerous turns, in my opinion. I don’t want to overstate it, but I genuinely believe it. The change is too big, across the board, at every level. Luckily there’s a lot of friction tied to doing things the same way we’ve done them for decades. But this stuff, folks, this stuff runs deep, and I’m sure we’ll have to face some very difficult times.
