A short history of technology freakouts

Panic over new technologies goes at least far back to Ancient Greece, when Socrates sounded the alarm over an increasingly popular one: writing.

As related in Plato’s Dialogues, Socrates warned his fellow teachers that writing was ruining a generation of students.

His warning went unheeded, of course. To this day, the written word continues to make people difficult to get along with. (I speak from experience.)

The printed word was even scarier.

"The art of printing can be of great service in so far as it furthers the circulation of useful & tested books,” Pope Alexander VI wrote in his papal bull of 1501, “but it can bring about serious evils.”

His solution might sound familiar: “It will, therefore, be necessary to maintain full control over the printers.”

The Church was worried about books spreading dangerous ideas. Three hundred years later, there was a panic over books spreading frivolous ones.

“Novels have been long and frequently regarded not as being merely useless to society, but even as pernicious, from the very indifferent morality, and ridiculous way of thinking, which they almost generally inculcate,” a 1789 letter printed by The Gentleman’s Magazine read. 

The writer suggested countering the pernicious effects of novels with a sin tax — which no “industrious” person would ever have to pay, he reasoned.

The next great wave of technology panic arrived with machines in the 19th century.

In Britain, for example, Parliament responded to popular concerns over dangers posed by steam-powered automobiles with the Locomotives Act of 1865: “At least Three Persons shall be employed to drive or conduct such Locomotive,” it stipulated — one of whom would walk 60 feet ahead, keeping a red flag “constantly displayed.”

In 1878, the law was revised, in part because the red flags were frightening horses. The person walking in front was assigned to walk alongside instead, without a flag.

(Keeping up should not have been a problem. The law also imposed a maximum speed of four miles per hour in the countryside and two in towns.)

That same year, The Daily Graphic devoted a front page to the “awful possibilities of the new speaking phonograph.”

Sketches helpfully depicted 10 of these possibilities, including thieves tricking elderly millionaires into recording an amendment to their wills, men using opera recordings to lure women out of their homes, and wives pranking their sleeping husbands with a record that shouted “POLICE! FIRE!”

Some wanted the government to intervene in the phonograph business. “If the inventor should let it fall into reckless hands we may see special sessions of State Legislatures called this summer to put down what might easily become an intolerable nuisance,” a South Carolina newspaper opined.

In the 1920s, it was the radio, which critics blamed for a long list of societal maladies — including dead birds, broken windows, exploding dirigibles, and the blind losing jobs.

Some critics blamed the radio for excessive rain. Others blamed it for drought.

The panic around machines taking jobs from humans started around that time, as well — and never stopped. The headline from a 1961 edition of the Sydney Morning Herald could have run at any point over the past century: 

To run the headline today, you’d only have to remove the “un” from “unskilled.”

By the 1980s, even a portable cassette player could seem threatening.

“People may be using [the] Walkman to blot out unpleasant thoughts about life and work,” syndicated journalist Rich Scheinin warned. “Or, in the case of shy people, to turn inward so basic social skills needn’t be learned.”

Another journalist went so far as to call it the very worst thing happening in 1981. “Of all the saddening signs of a troubled society,” Bob Greene wrote for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, “I saw perhaps the most chilling of all the other afternoon. There, on the midway of the Ohio State Fair, strolled teenagers wearing Sony Walkman earphones.”

The backlash against the Walkman included local legislation against crossing the street while wearing headphones.

In 2005, the French government warned that crossing into an air-conditioned room could be even more dangerous: "It is necessary to dress people more warmly before they enter a cooled room in order to avoid thermal shock and the health consequences that could result from it."

The threat of a choc thermique is why air conditioning remains strictly regulated in France.

(Americans seem strangely shock-resistant.)

There are many more examples. 

“Virtually all new technologies trigger what sociologists would call moral panics,” technology researcher Evgeny Morozov says. “This has been true throughout the ages.” 

Today, we may be experiencing a technology panic for the ages.

“We Must Pace the Frontier,” Anthropic’s Dario Amodei said this weekend.

Amodei warns that language models like Anthropic’s Claude will soon be powerful enough to break free from human control and take over the entire internet. Or be misused by humans in cyberattacks or bioterrorism. Or destabilize the economy. Or cause mass unemployment.

As is usually the case with the Cassandras of technology, I believe Amodei is sincere — just as he was in 2019 when he co-authored a post for OpenAI warning that GPT-2 was too dangerous to share with other AI researchers. 

“Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model,” the authors explained. “Our model is capable of generating samples from a variety of prompts that feel close to human quality.”

Just seven years later, that doesn’t sound any scarier than, say, crossing the street with a Walkman. Less so, probably.

But what would Socrates say?

His criticism of writing was that it “can neither defend itself nor come to its own support…or clarify what it means if you ask it a question.”

Until now!

Socrates might finally approve of writing.

Let’s hope it works a little faster with AI.

— Byron Gilliam

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