Microsoft founder Bill Gates doesn't empathize why people are not concerned virtually artificial intelligence (AI), agreeing with Elon Musk that it could be ane of our biggest existential threats. Microsoft'due south research head Eric Horvitz disagrees. Business organisation over the social and economical impacts of AI is ane of the many controversies surrounding emerging technologies.

In that location are many reasons for this opposition to new technologies. In my new book, Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies, I argue that our sense of what it means to exist man lies at the root of some of the skepticism almost technological innovation.

The book was launched on six July at the 16th Conference of the International Schumpeter Society in Montreal. Given Schumpeter's comments on innovators and entrepreneurs – he once said that their work opened them upward to "social ostracism and to concrete prevention or to direct attack" – there could not have been a more than suitable venue. Schumpeter wrote this annotate in 1912. Which is to say that we take a long history of resisting technological advances. And it's to history we must plow to understand why this is so.

Prototype: INKCINCT cartoons

Looking in the past for answers

The volume draws from 600 years of technological controversies ranging from attacks on java in Medieval Center East and Europe to today's debates on the potential impact of AI, drones, iii-D printing, and gene editing.

Information technology argues that gild tends to reject new technologies when they substitute for, rather than augment, our humanity. Our desire to humanize engineering is captured in the humour of this Bradley's Bromide: "If computers become as well powerful, we tin organize them into a committee – that will do them in."

We eagerly embrace them when they support our desire for inclusion, purpose, challenge, meaning and alignment with nature. We do so even when they are unwieldy, expensive, fourth dimension-consuming to use, and constantly suspension down.

For example, the early days of the introduction of tractors in the United States were hardly the paragon of farm efficiency. Tractors offered little advantage over horses. Some opponents argued that their value could be marginally improved if they could reproduce themselves like horses.

What 'brick phones' teach us virtually new technologies

As technologies drift across countries and continents, their societal implications also change. For example, when Motorola introduced cellphones in the Usa in 1983, they were dismissed as toys for the rich. They cost $four,000 (today's equivalent of $ten,000), weighed 2 pounds, stood at a foot alpine, took ten hours to charge, and delivered but 30 minutes of talk fourth dimension.

These metrics would accept qualified them as a tool for updating i's Facebook condition. They were the barrel of jokes, dubbed "brick phones" because of their shape and weight.

The start model was chosen DyanTAC, standing for Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage. Despite this aggressive and prospective name, the early models did little to broaden our humanity, peculiarly for immature people. Adoption rates in the The states were glacial, putting it well backside Europe, Asia and Africa.

When cellphones hit Africa, they were reinvented by engineers and diffused using novel business models created by entrepreneurs in Kenya, who pioneered mobile money transfer – called "transfer" instead of "banking" because banks wouldn't permit the telecoms agree money.

Unique subscriber growth in sub-Saharan Africa

Today cellphones are no longer simply a communication tool. They are serving as banks, schools, clinics, and vehicles for spreading transparency and republic. They augment our humanity in ways that could non have been predictable in the early 1980s. They are also serving as a role model for improvements in other sectors such as off-grid electricity supply.

And now we have more than just cellphones. We live in exciting times where technological diverseness and creativity offer limitless opportunities to aggrandize the human potential for all, not just for certain sectional sections of society.

When technologies 'requite back'

Innovation and Its Enemies shows that resistance to new technologies is heightened when the public perceives that the benefits of new technologies volition only accumulate to a pocket-sized section of club, while the risks are likely to be widespread. This is why technologies promoted by large corporations frequently face stiff opposition from the public.

Similarly, new technologies confront great opposition when the public perceives that the risks are probable to be felt in the curt run and the benefits volition simply accumulate in the long run. So telling a skeptical public that new technologies will benefit hereafter generations does not protect us from the wrath of electric current ones.

What is the way forrard? The answer might lie in the much-driveling phrase "social entrepreneurship". For many, this term is a euphemism for a charity or nongovernmental system. Just what is really needed is to bring the "social" back into "entrepreneurship".

This means exploring new ways by which enterprises can be seen equally contributing to the mutual adept. The fact that enterprises use new technologies to enhance their competitiveness makes it difficult for the full general public to split technology from its uses – for amend or for worse.

The fate of new technologies volition keep to be determined by the residuum of power in club. For nearly 400 years, Ottoman rulers opposed the printing of the Koran. Doing so would have undermined the role of religious leaders every bit sources of cultural codes. Simply when the printed give-and-take seemed to reinforce the power of the rulers they slowly went against previous fatwas banning the printing of the Koran.

Innovation and Its Enemies provides many other examples where the acceptable of new technologies is dependent on whether they reinforce rather than undermine incumbent practices. The dilemma facing mod gild is whether reinforcing existing practices undermines society.

New technologies are essential to fostering economic growth, meeting human needs, and protecting the surround. New clean energy technologies such equally solar photovoltaic cells and wind turbines, for example, are critical to reducing carbon dioxide emission and addressing the challenges of climate change.

Price of solar panel per watt

Epitome: Earth Policy Institute/Bloomberg

Only their adoption is often held back by the incumbent industries and vested interests. The dilemma is that in many cases clinging to the former may in fact be in conflict with our humanity, specially in regard to our search for affinity with nature. As the American composer John Cage aptly put it: "I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."