Left Behind: How the Rhetoric of AI Inevitability Dumbs Down the Conversation

Every fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation remembers what they were doing (more or less) when Captain Jean-Luc Picard became "Locutus" of Borg. Captured by a terrifying civilization of cyborgs who "assimilate" entire species, Picard is brainwashed and outfitted with mechanical boxes and hoses that jut painfully from the right side of his head. When the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise eventually recaptures him, the still-Borg-addled Picard threatens to assimilate Worf, his Klingon security officer. "Why do you resist," he pleads. "We only want to raise quality of life for all species."

"I like my species the way it is," Worf snarls.

Lately, it feels like the cheerleaders for artificial intelligence have gone full Borg as they shill for their favorite technology online. The salivating over AI on LinkedIn is queasily cult-like, especially among younger people. One young woman proudly admits to treating a chatbot as a personal assistant, therapist, and creative coach. Another declares that the world is shifting and AI is changing the future. Still another urges people to leverage the technology in business and life. There are hundreds of posts like this.

The AI happy talk also comes with dire warnings of your obsolescence if you resist. One user asks, rhetorically, "is AI leaving you behind?" Another user answers in all caps: "LEARN TO USE AI OR GET LEFT BEHIND." According to this great fount of professional wisdom, you risk your job if you don't start learning AI and integrating it into your life, right now. If your company or industry isn't already using AI, it's time for a "wake-up call." With all the objectivity and nuance of an altar call at a tent revival, I am warned to accept AI as my personal lord and savior...or else.

If it feels like a bandwagon, it probably is.

In 19th-century America, when the circus arrived, they would send a horse-drawn wagon into town with a band on board, playing music to attract a crowd to the big tent—a bandwagon Eventually, the word was used idiomatically in the phrase "jump on the bandwagon" to refer to the act of joining an activity that is already popular. To jump on the bandwagon means that you are a follower, an opportunist.

It is not a compliment.

No technology is inevitable. In the '50s and '60s, the techno-utopians were confidently declaring that the whole world would be powered by nuclear energy—"too cheap to meter," predicted Lewis Strauss, chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1954. It didn’t happen because technologists, bureaucrats, and business people underestimated the cost and ease of scaling up nuclear power and overestimated the public tolerance for its negative consequences. A handful of high-profile accidents at nuclear power plants in the 1970s and 1980s changed the course of the entire industry.

Nuclear energy is not an anomaly in this regard. The history of tech is littered with examples of supposedly slam dunk innovations and products that failed to live up to the triumphalist rhetoric—Google Glass, the Segway, 3D printing of consumer products at home, Second Life, Hydrogen fuel cell cars, Mark Zuckerberg’s big VR wet dream, etc.

The illusion of Ai inevitability is a by-product of the reality distortion field that often surrounds any promising new tech. “The development of new technology is never merely a technical affair," observes historian David Noble. "It is always a social process in which powerful interests strive to control both the direction and the outcome.” Modern digital technologists drive public interest among investors and potential consumers with deep marketing budgets. They have outsized access to the levers of political power. They can shape the conversation in ways that benefit their products. They know how to hype new technology.

The American public participates in the illusion as well. In his 2013 book To Save Everything, Click Here, Evgeny Morozov coined the term "solutionism" to explain how critical analysis is overwhelmed and shut down in the discourse on solving big problems. “Solutionism presumes rather than investigates the problems it is trying to solve, reaching for the answer before the questions have been fully asked.” In other words, we often shortcut to the quick-fix tech solution without considering the problem thoroughly or holistically.

Langdon Winner summarized this bias for uncomplicated solutions in his 1986 book The Whale and the Reactor:

“If someone says, ‘Let’s build a bridge,’ and someone else says, ‘That’s fine, but who will it serve, who will it exclude, and who will decide?’—the second person is treated as a crank.”

Winner's point is that the engineer's or technologist's proximate solution to a problem is often given more weight and support than any consideration of the unpleasant social, economic, or political complexities surrounding it. Technology is often depoliticized, presented as neutral, inevitable, and destined to produce positive outcomes—an instrument of progress—with all of the attendant messiness of inequality, environmental destruction, exploitation, and societal disruption swept aside as problems that will eventually be solved along the way. The critical questions are asked in a soft voice alongside the much louder calls to release the tech now.

The inevitability discourse is solutionism in action because it pushes for rapid integration before the many potential problems associated with AI are fully aired. "You'll be left behind," is code for inevitability. It says, 'there's no time to think about it, the future is now. Get on board.'

Jump on the bandwagon.

We are not well served by the inevitability discourse. It dumbs down the conversation and blinds us from considering the potentially catastrophic downstream consequences of new technology. We would be wise to consider the words of Neil Postman in his 1992 book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology: “Technological change is not additive; it is ecological," he warns. "A new technology does not merely add something; it changes everything.”