From the front page of The Wall Street Journal of August 14, 2025, from an article “Latest in Silicon Valley: Embryo IQ Screening: “Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, a mathematician, spent seven years researching how to keep an advanced form of artificial intelligence from destroying humanity before he concluded that stopping it wasn’t possible-at least anytime soon.”
The Artificial Intelligence Revolution is going to make the Industrial Revolution look like a teen-age run lemonade stand next to a freeway.
Where the Industrial Revolution caused populations to nearly double, as in England, the Artificial Intelligence Revolution is not likely to have such an impact. While new factories of the Industrial Revolution brought millions of jobs, the Artificial Intelligence Revolution is not likely to do the same. In fact, many companies are warning that a considerable amount, as much as forty percent, will lose their jobs. Some of you might have noticed that when doing a search now with whatever may be your favorite search engine, you get links to click on trying to sell you something. It’s as if you were driving along, and suddenly the entire sky is blocked with billboards. Thanks, Artificial Intelligence Revolution.
Similarly, lots of millionaires, excuse me, billionaires will arise from the Artificial Intelligence Revolution. Just as the Industrial Revolution claimed life would get better, and the working class would be less laden, the opposite happened. The machines that produced goods didn’t get tired, as in animal or human energy driving them, so the workers had a much longer work day. Add to that the dangers of the new machinery that amputated human limbs like twigs from a tree, and you get a revolution that left a lot of casualties.
I separate the Industrial Revolution into two parts: The First Industrial Revolution, around the year 1790, where energy other than muscle, human or animal drove production, was replaced by other energy, like water, wind or coal. The Second Industrial Revolution, around 1860, was where machines could make other machines. Blast furnaces, punch presses, lathes, and other machines made the parts to create other machines. Then there was the Computer Revolution, in full gear by the 1970s or 1980s. The Second Computer Revolution is now upon us; computers are now making computers and designing software for those new computers, without much of any human effort. Good lord, history repeats itself, I’m sure that must be a new idea?
Just as the Industrial Revolution repositioned war, the Second Computer Revolution will do exactly the same. World War One was one of the first post-Industrial Revolution wars. The military schools of Europe had not adapted to the new technology; any historian will tell you that World War One was fought using strategies that were obsolete in the world of the Industrial Revolution. While lining up thousands of soldiers and charging each other on the battlefield was great with muskets and swords, machine guns mowed down the charging armies like grass, except that grass doesn’t bleed like humans. Add tanks and artillery that had not existed before, and you have industrialized war that had never been seen on the battlefield. This was horrendous to humanity, plain and simple.
Guns were made to protect us from harm, but bad people got their hands on them.
Nuclear power was going to render electricity almost free. Now nuclear material waits in warheads in silos, ready at almost any time to annihilate us at any time. All technology that was going to save us has been used to kill us off, and the quicker the AI people can make money on killing us, the sooner it will get started with eliminating the human race. It was fun while it lasted, and even if the billionaires who might survive the inevitable assault on humanity somehow get through it, they won’t have any public to exploit.
