You may have heard the term “Luddite,” but never heard of Ned Ludd. To be fair to them, he might not have existed at all. But the movement named for him certainly did!
In the early 1800’s, Luddites fought to stop the expansion of technology in Great Britain. At that time, high technology meant knitting frames and mechanized looms. When these machines were installed in factories, people would often smash them intentionally.
The only future these Luddites could see looked just like the present. People would keep doing what their parents had done and their grandparents before them. They thought that allowing mechanization would cost them jobs. They were wrong.
Over time, the knitting frame kept getting better and better. As Smithsonian magazine wrote, that “helped the textile industry grow—and created many new jobs.” Humans found better things to do than knit.
Fast forward to the high-tech of today—Artificial Intelligence (AI). Just as our ancestors feared looms in the 1800s, many people today fear AI. They fear what it may do and how much energy it demands. AI, like any innovation, comes with its tradeoffs. How AI will increasingly impact our culture and civil society is definitely worth watching closely. As for how much energy it uses, a recent article in the Economist noted, “The energy costs of building and using bigger models are spiraling, and breakthroughs are getting harder.” True, but this problem opens two opportunities.
The first is expanding clean energy supplies.
Companies are partnering with utilities to use clean nuclear energy to power their AI systems. Amazon has recently inked two deals to invest in small modular reactors (SMRs). Amazon wants to build an SMR in Virginia and another in Washington state.
In a similar deal, Constellation Energy will reopen the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear plant and sell all the electricity it generates to one customer: Microsoft. “Powering industries critical to our nation’s global economic and technological competitiveness, including data centers, requires an abundance of energy that is carbon-free and reliable every hour of every day, and nuclear plants are the only energy sources that can consistently deliver on that promise,” Constellation’s CEO said.
TMI should not have been shuttered in the first place. “Even though it was operating at relatively high efficiency and with low costs, it was driven out of business by record low prices for natural gas and the introduction of relatively cheap, subsidized renewable energy to the grid,” according to an article in MIT Technology Review. But our country needs all the energy we can get, especially if it is carbon-free.
Microsoft’s need created an opportunity to have more clean electricity flow into the grid. Furthermore, investments in newer technologies from larger companies can help drive down the green premium, expanding chances for even greater commercial deployment.
The next opportunity that AI unlocks is human ingenuity.
The Economist notes that: “The difficulty of getting people into space led to innovations that are now used on Earth, too.” Likewise, when Americans faced a lack of oil, we developed fracking techniques that released gushers of oil and inexpensive domestic natural gas. The need for computer chips that handle more information with less energy drives innovation in this space. Companies are developing new chips and new software that do more with less.
Contrast that innovation with the modern version of the Luddite: government intervention that tries to guide industrial policy.
Federal policy gave Americans the CHIPS Act, which provided billions in government money to companies that would open plants to build yesterday’s technology. (Not to mention, until recently, chip plants were hamstrung by federal permitting bureaucracy.) Meanwhile, American companies have already moved on to investing in tomorrow’s technology; three of the five most advanced chip makers are in the U.S.
“The problem is that the Chips Act gave $0 to any of those companies,” innovation expert Steve Blank told Quartz. But “while we were doing the Chips Act, we put export controls on the three U.S. companies to stop selling their advanced equipment to China.” That meant a Japan-based company made massive profits selling its chips while American companies struggled.
Export bans have “unintentionally stimulated the growth of a research system in China that excels at working ‘round constraints,” the Economist writes. That’s what innovators do, of course. We should also encourage more immigration by foreign researchers, so they can make discoveries here and add to the sum of our knowledge.
The goal is to encourage bottom-up innovation rather than impose top-down governmental limitations or have the government pick which innovations should move forward with preferential treatment. Tomorrow won’t look like today. It will look better. Tell Ned Ludd that. If you can find him.
