I was eight years old when my family got our first home computer. I remember this hulking grey Dell computer taking up massive amounts of space on the desk, and I remember thinking to myself how amazing technology was.
The mood around tech is no longer nearly as cheery. Over the past five years, Americans have grown increasingly concerned over the broadening prevalence of AI. Pew Research reports 52% of Americans say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, a 15-point jump since 2021.
That’s not to say that AI and tech have always had a positive portrayal in the American consciousness and these fears are a recent development. In 1984, audiences gasped as killer robots sent by rogue AI Skynet hunted Kyle Reese and Sarah Connors in Terminator.
Nearly two decades earlier in 1967, sci-fi author Harlan Ellison penned I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. The short story depicts an AI uprising and a military supercomputer named AM who gains sentience and eradicates humanity except for five individuals who it tortures in perpetuity. And who could forget the cold, unfeeling gaze of HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey?
But is humanity condemned to face an army of Terminators or a maniacal AI overlord? I wanted to cut past the doomsaying, so I invited Jay Richards, Heritage Foundation’s Vice President of Social and Domestic Policy and the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in American Principles and Public Policy and author of the Human Advantage, to discuss.