Derek Thompson

I had an interesting conversation last year when I was simultaneously working on Abundance and this cover story that I wrote for The Atlantic called The Antisocial Century.

And for that latter story, I talked to Bob Putnam, Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone.

And he made this interesting point about technology, which he significantly blames for the rise of solitude in America.

He said, too often, we adopt a technology and then we adopt that technology's values

without thinking about incorporating that technology into our values.

And so one example of his was the television.

And we're going to get to AI in a second.

He said, with television...

You know, most people put a television in the room and then immediately started watching five, six hours of television a day.

It was as if the human body were designed by evolution to do nothing but sit on the couch and watch streaming images on a screen.

That's how immediately it insinuated itself into modern life.

That's different from, say, the Amish, which are very, very purposeful about almost screening a technology to ensure that it fit their values before incorporating it.

And so, for example, something like solar energy, which they say does fit their values, you can often find near Amish farms.

Whereas the television set, they said, it's going to interrupt the values that we have about family interconnectedness and time spent looking at other people in the face.

And so we're going to keep it out of our homes.

I don't think that we should take the Amish approach to television with artificial intelligence.

I don't think we should ban it.

But I do think we should take a kind of Amish light approach to thinking about incorporating this technology into our values rather than adopting the values of artificial intelligence mindlessly.

What the latter would mean is

allowing data centers to be built absolutely anywhere, including in many places, as the Wall Street Journal reported, in places where residential developers are selling land that is needed for homes for people to data centers to build a house for computer chips.