\u201cLooking at what\u2019s possible, it does feel surprisingly slow,\u201d Sam Altman said recently on the topic of AI adoption rates. It is no surprise to see technology leaders bemoan the pace of AI diffusion \u2013 they have something to sell, after all. But why do so many political leaders echo their impatience for greater speed?<\/p>\n
I do understand the underlying rationale. If AI can boost productivity growth \u2013 and I think it might well do in a number of sectors \u2013 then the sooner you can spread it, the sooner you can reap the benefits for growth. For the UK government in particular, which is trying to jolt into life a moribund economy, the appeal is understandable.<\/p>\n
But bullish rhetoric about \u201cunleashing\u201d AI is badly out of touch with the sensibilities of many voters in the developed world. A poll in the US last month found that just 6 per cent of registered voters thought the use of AI was moving too slowly, while 30 per cent thought it was moving at the right pace, and 60 per cent felt it was moving too quickly.<\/p>\n
Leaders like Donald Trump often talk about an AI \u201crace\u201d, but I suspect that many people either don\u2019t know what the finish line is supposed to be, or have only heard it articulated by technology executives, whose predictions of the future don\u2019t exactly sound like a place that most normal people would want to accelerate towards. Anthropic\u2019s Dario Amodei foresees \u201cunusually painful\u201d labour market disruption at a pace that is \u201chard for people to adapt to\u201d, while Altman recently said: \u201cWe see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of late, politicians have moderated their tone somewhat. Trump has told AI companies they need \u201cPR help\u201d while UK chancellor of the exchequer Rachel Reeves acknowledged people\u2019s concerns in a recent speech. \u201cThere will be bumps in the road as we navigate these changes,\u201d she admitted, while saying she wanted Britain to \u201cachieve the fastest rate of AI adoption\u201d in the G7. But the attempt to combine both messages doesn\u2019t work well. Most people know that bumps in the road ahead aren\u2019t usually a cue to press the accelerator.<\/p>\n
If the politics are tricky, the economic case for hurrying this transition along isn\u2019t completely clear-cut either. We know from history that people and economies are remarkably good at adapting to technological change over the long run. In 1920, more than 14 per cent of people worked in agriculture and mining in the UK, for example. By 2016, that share had fallen to almost 1 per cent. In many professions and sectors that have declined gradually over time, older people have retired and younger people have not joined.<\/p>\n
But economic change can be painful if it outpaces people\u2019s ability to adapt. MIT professor David Autor\u2019s work on the \u201cChina shock\u201d, for example, highlighted the impact of Chinese competition on American textile mill workers, many of whom were geographically concentrated and struggled to get out of harm\u2019s way fast enough.<\/p>\n
A new paper by Argentine economist Eduardo Levy Yeyati argues that two economies can arrive at the same technological frontier, and yet experience different transitions. \u201cIn one, firms adopt AI at a pace the labour market can absorb,\u201d he writes. \u201cIn the other, adoption outruns reallocation capacity. The long-run destination may be identical; the permanent social damage is not.\u201d<\/p>\n
The public is aware, too, that general purpose technologies always lead to social and cultural as well as economic change. Indeed, when Anthropic recently interviewed 80,000 users of its Claude chatbot across 159 countries, many of the concerns people raised were outside the economic realm: autonomy and agency; cognitive atrophy; misinformation; privacy; wellbeing and dependency.<\/p>\n
The economic historian Karl Polanyi once argued that \u201cit should need no elaboration that a process of undirected change, the pace of which is deemed too fast, should be slowed down, if possible, so as to safeguard the welfare of the community\u201d.<\/p>\n
This does not have to be an argument against change \u2013 even rapid change. The key phrases, for me, are \u201cundirected\u201d and \u201cdeemed too fast\u201d. Whether a process feels \u201ctoo fast\u201d depends on the psychological and practical capacity of society to cope with the pace. That capacity can be improved via better safety nets and proactive skills policies that enable people to pre-empt and drive change, rather than merely react to it.<\/p>\n
But at the moment, I think many people feel they are in a speeding car without either a seat belt or their hands on the wheel. In those circumstances, nobody should be surprised if they vote to hit the brakes. \u2013 Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cLooking at what\u2019s possible, it does feel surprisingly slow,\u201d Sam Altman said recently on the topic of AI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379755,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,3673,218,219,969,61,60,7689,80],"class_list":["post-379754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-donald-trump","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sam-altman","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379754\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}