FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN

There are certainly justifiable reasons to be concerned about the far-reaching ramifications of artificial intelligence. Nobody really knows for sure its impact on the workplace. And in the absence of guarantees that the benefits will outweigh the flaws, fear runs rampant.

But when we talk with friends about AI, they forget that this isn’t the first technology to conjure up fear and loathing. In fact, historically almost every new scientific advance has led to public concern, and even terror among some – only to become adopted as the wrinkles are ironed out (which may, admittedly take a little time).

With that in mind, we decided to see what people were thinking when new innovations first came on the scene.

Back in the late 1700s, Edward Jenner developed a vaccine against the then deadly scourge of smallpox by exposing people to far less virulent cowpox. But when the government started to mandate that people receive the vaccines, concerns spread that government was putting poison into their blood.

As the Morgan Library and Museum states “opposition to Jenner’s vaccine was quick to emerge, with its bovine origins often provoking some of the most vehement criticism. Objections were made on both medical and religious grounds, condemning vaccination as a dangerous and unsanitary procedure involving the forbidden mingling of animal matter with human flesh.

“Outspoken opponents such as the physician Benjamin Moseley (1742–1819) sought to alarm readers with luridly worded arguments against the abominable practice of introducing a “bestial humour into the human frame,” while hinting darkly at the “strange mutations from quadruped sympathy” that might result as well as relating fantastical accounts of vaccinated children sprouting cow hair or developing facial features distorted “to resemble that of an Ox.”

Later on in that century, when steam trains came into popular use, there were several frightening scenarios foist upon the populace. Traveling over 30 miles per hour could cause “delirium foriosum” some said. This was a kind of insanity that they believed could result from looking out the train windows to see the landscape whizzing by. There was even concern that the vibrations and speed could cause miscarriages or damage to women’s reproductive organs.

By the late 1800s, there was yet another new-fangled innovation to fear: electricity. Some Americans were particularly concerned that electricity (like water from a tap) cold leak into a room from an empty socket if the switch was left on. Humorist James Thurber wrote in his wonderful “My Life and Hard Times” that his grandmother was fearful that electricity was “dripping invisibly all over the house.”

When we first read this story, we assumed that Thurber was just making this up (even though “My Life and Hard Times” was intended to be a memoir.) But it turns out that his grandmother wasn’t alone in her trepidation. In fact, “President Benjamin Harrison and his wife Caroline were the first to live in an electrified White House, but electricity was so new at the time that the couple refused to touch the light switches for fear of electric shock. The White House staff was in charge of turning the lights on and off,” reports the U.S. Department of  Energy.

Then there was the radio. Some were fearful that this kind of in-home entertainment would effectively kill off normal social life, as people stayed home and listened to the new magical boxes. (And by the way, Ladies Home Journal reported that a similar phenomenon was afoot when people were able to rent videos from places like Blockbuster. We know this because we – and now we’re embarrassed by this – wrote the article over 40 years ago).

But there were even more dramatic concerns about the advent of radio in the 1920s. “Farmers of the 1920s used to blame too much rain, earthquakes, and droughts on the new technology of radio,” according to Paleofuture: The History of the Future.

When television first came into American homes, just as with radio, there was similar concern that it would destroy any kind of social life.

Finally (and there are many more examples) when computers came into broad use, just as with AI, there was widespread belief that mainframes (with less computing power than a cellular phone today) could allow automation to lead to mass unemployment as middle-class jobs would be rendered obsolete. In fact a 1957 film Desk Set, featuring Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, was based on the fear that a new computer was going to put Hepburn and all of her compatriots out of work.

This wasn’t just the kind of concern spread by entertainment. Consider the Time Magazine article from 1961 titled “The Automation Jobless.” Time wrote that “Dr. Russell Ackoff, a Case Institute expert on business problems, feels that automation is reaching into so many fields so fast that it has become ‘the nation's second most important problem.’ (First: peace.)

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