Centers of Progress, Pt. 18: Edinburgh (Scottish Enlightenment)

The Scottish Enlightenment led to many intellectual accomplishments, including the emergence of empiricism and modern economics.

Chelsea Follett — Dec 17, 2020

Today marks the eighteenth installment in a series of articles by HumanProgress.org called Centers of Progress. Where does progress happen? The story of civilization is in many ways the story of the city. It is the city that has helped to create and define the modern world. This bi-weekly column will give a short overview of urban centers that were the sites of pivotal advances in culture, economics, politics, technology, etc.

Our eighteenth Center of Progress is Edinburgh. The city was at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment – a vital period in intellectual history that spanned the 18th and early 19th centuries. The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment made important breakthroughs in economics, mathematics, architecture, medicine, poetry, chemistry, theatre, engineering, portraiture, and geology.

Today, Edinburgh remains Scotland’s intellectual and cultural center, as well as its capital. The city’s name comes from an old Celtic word, Eidyn, which is a name for the area, and burgh, which means fortress. A hilly city on Scotland’s east coast, Edinburgh is home to a famous castle dating to at least the 12th century. Edinburgh Castle is Scotland’s most-visited tourist attraction, drawing over 2 million visitors in 2019 alone. The city is also home to the University of Edinburgh, one of Scotland’s most prestigious universities. Edinburgh’s nicknames include Auld Reekie (Old Smoky) for Old Town’s smoky chimneys. The city is also sometimes called Auld Greekie, or the “Athens of the North,” for the city’s role as a hub of philosophy. Edinburgh’s medieval Old Town and neoclassical New Town together comprise a single UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Archeological evidence suggests that the area where Edinburgh now stands has been inhabited since at least 8,500 BC. Celtic tribespeople were the main inhabitants. Over the centuries, the area was ruled by various peoples, including Welsh-speaking Brythonic Celts. Edinburgh came under Scottish rule around 960 AD, when King Indulf the Aggressor seized the settlement. Edinburgh became the Scottish capital in 1437, replacing Scone.

Scotland in the 18th century had just undergone decades of political and economic turmoil. Disruption was caused by the House of Orange’s ousting of the House of Stuart, the Jacobite Rebellions, the failed and costly colonial Darien Scheme, famine, and the 1707 Union of Scotland and England. Yet Scotland, particularly Edinburgh, were to embark on an exciting new journey.

If you could visit Edinburgh during the Scottish Enlightenment, you would enter a cold, compact, walled-off city of winding, cobblestone streets. The Scottish author James Buchan has described the city of the era as “Inconvenient, dirty, old-fashioned, alcoholic, quarrelsome and poor.” But through the fog, you would see the warm glow of lights in the windows of the university buildings, the homes hosting reading societies and club meetings, and the taverns serving haggis and whiskey to patrons discussing philosophy. The city was alive with the energy of new ideas and the spirit of scientific inquiry. While Edinburgh was then a city of merely 40,000 residents, it was crowded with great minds tackling big questions.

It helped that the city’s religious culture was welcoming to new ideas. The dominant Presbyterian Church had just undertaken a successful literacy campaign. Scotland, then one of Western Europe’s poorest countries, enjoyed perhaps the world’s highest literacy rate. The reigning faction within the Presbyterian Church was comprised of moderate, open-minded clergymen. Those moderates formed close ties to many of the Scottish Enlightenment’s key figures and encouraged their work. There was also a more conservative faction within the Presbyterian Church that disdained the Enlightenment scholars’ work and even tried to excommunicate the philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) for heresy. The better-connected moderate faction within the church shielded Hume from ex-communication.

The moderate Presbyterian Reverend William Robertson (1721–1793) became the University of Edinburgh’s principal and founded one of the Scottish Enlightenment’s most prominent intellectual societies in 1750. Robertson’s Select Society of Edinburgh counted among its members such luminaries as Hume, the philosopher and historian Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) and the economist Adam Smith (1723–1790).

Much like the French Enlightenment’s Parisian salons, the numerous reading societies and intellectual men’s clubs that sprung up throughout Edinburgh enabled the city’s success. Unlike in Paris, where women often hosted salons, sexist cultural norms excluded women from Edinburgh’s intellectual gatherings, with rare exceptions such as the poet and socialite Alison Cockburn (1712–1794). A modern woman would not wish to live in 18th-century Edinburgh, but the men at the time found the networking and debate opportunities afforded by the city’s various clubs invaluable. The French writer Voltaire opined in 1762 that “today it is from Scotland that we [Europeans] get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening.”

Scotland made its mark in the literary realm, producing such figures as the inimitable poet Robert Burns (1759–1796) and the Edinburger novelist Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832). Scotland also pioneered new landscaping, architectural, and interior design tastes. That was thanks largely to the Edinburgh-raised-and-educated architect Robert Adam (1728—1792). Together with his brother James (1730–94), he developed a new approach to architecture known as the “Adam style.” The “Adam style” influenced many residences in 18th-century England, Scotland, Russia, and the United States after Independence, where it evolved into the so-called “Federal style.” Scotland also led the way in portrait painting, thanks to taste-making Edinburger painters such as Allan Ramsay (1713—1784) and Sir Henry Raeburn (1756—1823).

While the Scottish Enlightenment produced many contributions to the arts and humanities, it also gave rise to groundbreaking work in the sciences. Thomas Jefferson, in 1789, wrote, “So far as science is concerned, no place in the world can pretend to competition with Edinburgh.” The Edinburger geologist James Hutton (1726—1797) redefined his field by developing many of the fundamental principles of his discipline. The chemist and physicist Joseph Black (1728—1799), who studied at the University of Edinburgh, discovered carbon dioxide, magnesium, and the important thermodynamic concepts of latent heat and specific heat.

The physician William Cullen (1710–1790) helped to make Edinburgh Medical School into the English-speaking world’s leading medical education center. There he helped to train many notable scientists, including Black and the anatomist Alexander Monro Secondus (1733–1817). The latter was the first person to detail the human lymphatic system. Sir James Young Simpson (1811–1870), admitted to the University of Edinburgh at the young age of fourteen, went on to develop chloroform anesthesia. That invention vastly improved the experience of surgery patients. It also saved Queen Victoria and countless other women from unnecessary suffering during childbirth.

The Scottish Enlightenment also advanced mathematics and engineering. The mathematician and University of Edinburgh professor Colin Maclaurin (1698–1746), a child prodigy who entered university at age 11, made notable contributions to the fields of geometry and algebra. The civil engineer Thomas Telford (1757–1834), who worked for a time in Edinburgh, was so prolific that he earned the nickname the Colossus of Roads (a play on one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, the Colossus of Rhodes). The Scottish engineer and inventor James Watt (1736—1819) greatly improved the steam engine’s design and thus helped to bring about the Industrial Revolution.

The American author Eric Weiner has argued that the key to Edinburgh’s sudden, unexpected success was Scottish practicality. The Encyclopædia Britannica, which was founded in Edinburgh in 1768 and was thus an invention of the Scottish Enlightenment, also claims that underlying the city’s diverse achievements were several notable developments in Scottish philosophy, all of which had a practical bent. Those developments were skepticism toward the so-called rationalist school of thought (which held that all truths could be deduced through the use of reason alone), a focus on empirical methods of scientific inquiry, the emergence of a philosophy of “common sense,” and attempts to develop a science of human nature.

Popularization of empiricism was among the greatest contributions of the Scottish Enlightenment to human progress. Relatedly, “common sense realism,” advanced by thinkers such as Ferguson, emphasized real-world observations rather than abstract theorizing and held that the uneducated, common man was an intellectual’s equal in matters of basic common sense. Common sense realism influenced the thinking of the U.S. Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, among others. Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), among the most influential philosophical works in history, was the foundational text of cognitive science.

The desire to understand human behavior gave rise not only to cognitive science, but also to economics. Adam Smith is widely regarded as the founder of modern economics. His An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) was among the first works to delve into such topics as the division of labor and the benefits of free-trade economies (as opposed to mercantilism and protectionism). The work not only influenced economic policy soon after it was published, but helped to define the terms of economic debate for centuries. Every important economic thinker since Smith, including those who strongly disagreed with Smith, such as Karl Marx, nonetheless cited the Scotsman and wrestled with his ideas.

By creating the field of economics, Smith helped humanity to think about policies that enhance prosperity. Those policies, including economic freedom that Smith advocated, have since helped to raise living standards to heights that would be unimaginable to Smith and his contemporaries. (Explore the evidence for yourself).

Edinburgh was an improbable Center of Progress. A relatively small, unkempt, and inhospitable locale emerged from a century of instability to take the world by storm. Widespread literacy, open-mindedness, intense debates at intellectual gatherings, and a practical grounding aided the city’s successes. Edinburgh was essentially a small university town that punched far above its weight in human achievement. The American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin noted that “the University of Edinburgh possessed a set of truly great men … as have ever appeared in any age or country.” For its innumerable achievements, and particularly for giving humanity empiricism and economics, Scottish Enlightenment-era Edinburgh is rightfully our eighteenth Center of Progress.

Blog Post | Economic Growth

The Human Meaning of Economic Growth

Misunderstandings of the relationship between wealth and flourishing have obscured the anti-human implications of slowing growth rates.

Saul Zimet — May 17, 2024

Summary: Economic growth has been a driving force behind the dramatic improvements in human wellbeing over the past few centuries. This growth has resulted from the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. Criticisms of growth stem in large part from misunderstandings of the relationship between economics and human values.

Why is the world as prosperous a place as it is? And why isn’t it much more prosperous? These questions are broad enough to admit countless answers, but as good an answer as any is the economic growth rate.

You might have heard that economic growth is overrated, that it’s a fine idea, but unsustainable, or even that it’s entirely counterproductive because it puts profits above people and the economy above the planet. These narratives have been widespread in recent years. They’re also based on a fundamental misconception of the nature of wealth and what a growing economy means for humanity.

Properly conceived, wealth is the actualization of human values in the real world. Economic growth is the upward trajectory of human achievement. The forms of prosperity that most of humanity strives for, such as health, knowledge, pleasure, safety, professional and personal freedom, and so many others, were vastly scarcer throughout most of human history—and would be orders of magnitude more abundant today if economic policies had been slightly different. That is the power of economic growth, and it is within our power to influence the world of future generations for better or worse.

The History of Economic Growth

Virtually everywhere and always throughout human history, economic growth was nonexistent. While pockets of momentary economic progress took place in certain instances, the overall trend was one of perpetual stagnation. But just a few hundred years ago, with the advent of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and capitalism, that all began to change.

When the conceptual tools of science became widely applied to create the technological advancements of the Industrial Revolution, they brought an unprecedented optimism about the capacity for investment in new discoveries and inventions to reliably uncover useful knowledge of the natural world. This change inspired the broad transformation of mere wealth (resources hidden away in vaults and treasure chests) into capital (resources invested in new inventions and discoveries).

By the time Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx wrote their Communist Manifesto in 1848, the optimism of investment had already transformed Western Europe. As Engels and Marx saw it, “The bourgeoisie [capitalist class], during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?”

Marx and Engels misunderstand the complex reasons for increased productivity (attributing it to untapped “social labour”) but the quotation is significant because, despite their sympathy for state centralization of the economy, they could not ignore the success of capitalism.

While no year before 1700 saw a gross world product of more than $643 billion (in international inflation-adjusted 2011 dollars), by 1820 global GDP reached 1 trillion. By 1940 the number had passed 7 trillion, and by 2015 it had passed 108 trillion.

Contrary to the popular misconception that capitalism has made the rich richer and the poor poorer, this new wealth contributed to growing the economies of every world region while outpacing population growth. While the world’s extreme poor have become wealthier so too have all other economic classes.

What’s So Great about Growth?

A growing economy isn’t about stacks of paper money getting taller, or digits being added to the spreadsheets of bank ledgers. These things may be indicators of growth, but the growth itself is composed of goods and services becoming more abundant. Farms and factories producing more and better consumption goods; engineers creating better machines and materials; clean water reaching more communities; sick people receiving better healthcare; scientists running more experiments, poets writing more poems, education becoming more broadly accessible; and for whatever other forms of value people choose to exchange their savings and labor.

Gross domestic product or GDP (called gross world product or world GDP when applied at the global level) is an imperfect but useful and widely employed measure of economic growth, and its reflection in the real world takes such forms as rising life expectancy, nutrition, literacy, safety from natural disaster, and virtually every other measure of human flourishing. This is because, at the most fundamental level, “economic growth” means the transformation and rearrangement of the physical environment into more useful forms that people value more.

Before the year 1820, human life expectancy had always been approximately 30-35 years. But with the great decline in poverty and rise of capital investment in technology and medicine, global life expectancy has roughly doubled in every geographic region in the last century. Similar trends have occurred in global nourishment, infant survival, literacy, access to clean water, and countless other crucial indicators of wellbeing. While these trends are bound to take the occasional momentary downturn because of life’s uncertainties and hardships, the unidirectional accumulation of technological and scientific knowledge since the Age of Enlightenment gives the forward march of progress an asymmetric advantage. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns resulted in a brief and tragic decline in life expectancy, but the number has since risen to an all-time high of 73.36 years as of 2023.

What is the direct causal connection between economic growth and these improvements to human wellbeing? Consider the example of deaths by natural disaster, which have fallen in the last century from about 26.5 per 100,000 people to 0.51 per 100,000 people. More wealth means buildings can be constructed from stronger materials and better climate controls. And when those protections aren’t enough, a wealthier community can afford better infrastructure such as roads and vehicles to efficiently get sick or injured people to the hospital. When those injured end up in the hospital, a wealthier society’s medical facilities will be equipped with more advanced equipment, cleaner sanitation, and better-trained doctors that will provide higher quality medical attention. These are just a few examples of how wealth allows humans to transform their world into a more hospitable place to live and face the inevitable challenges of life.

The benefits of economic growth go far beyond the maximization of health and safety for their own sake. If what you value in life is the contemplation of great art, the exaltation of your favorite deity, or time spent with your loved ones, wealth is what awards you the freedom to sustainably pursue those values rather tilling the fields for 16 hours per day and dying in your 30s. Wealth is what provides you access to an ever-improving share of the world’s culture by increasing the abundance and accessibility of printed, recorded, and digital materials. Wealth is what provides you with the leisure time and transportation technology to travel the world and experience distant wonders, remote holy sites, and people whose personal or professional significance to you would otherwise dwell beyond your reach.

As the Harvard University cognitive scientist Steven Pinker demonstrates in his popular book Enlightenment Now, “Though it’s easy to sneer at national income as a shallow and materialistic measure, it correlates with every indicator of human flourishing, as we will repeatedly see in the chapters to come.”

The Long-Term Future of Growth

Human psychology is ill-equipped to comprehend large numbers, especially as they relate to the profound numerical implications of exponentiation. If it sounds insignificant when politicians and journalists refer to a 1 percent or 2 percent increase or decrease in the annual growth rate, then like most people, you’re being deceived by a quirk of human intuition. While small changes to the economic growth rate may not have noticeable effects in the short term, their long- term implications are absolutely astonishing.

Economist Tyler Cowen has pointed out in a Foreign Affairs article, “In the medium to long term, even small changes in growth rates have significant consequences for living standards. An economy that grows at one percent doubles its average income approximately every 70 years, whereas an economy that grows at three percent doubles its average income about every 23 years—which, over time, makes a big difference in people’s lives.” In his book Stubborn Attachments, Cowen offers a thought experiment to illustrate the real-world implications of such “small changes” to the growth rate: “Redo U.S. history, but assume the country’s economy had grown one percentage point less each year between 1870 and 1990. In that scenario, the United States of 1990 would be no richer than the Mexico of 1990.”

Cowen gave the negative scenario in which the growth rate was 1 percent slower. US Citizens would have drastically shorter lifespans, less education, less healthcare, less safety from violence, more susceptibility to disease and natural disaster, fewer career choices, and so on. Now imagine the opposite scenario, in which US economic policy had just 1 additional percentage point of growth each year. The average American today would in all probability be living much longer, having much nicer housing, choosing from far more career opportunities, and enjoying more advanced technology.

Just imagine your income doubling, and what you could do for yourself, your family, or the charity of your choice with all that extra wealth. Something along those lines could have happened to most Americans. But instead, growth has been significantly slowed in the United States because taxes and regulations have constantly disincentivized and disallowed new innovations.

At the margins, many dying of preventable diseases could have been cured, many who spiraled into homelessness could have accessed the employment opportunities or mental health treatment they needed, and so on. While economic fortune seems like a luxury to those who already enjoy material comfort, there are always many at the margin for whom the health of the economy is the difference between life and death.

These are among the reasons that Harvard University economist Gregory Mankiw concludes in his commonly used college textbook Macroeconomics that, “Long-run economic growth is the single most important determinant of the economic well-being of a nation’s citizens. Everything else that macroeconomists study — unemployment, inflation, trade deficits, and so on — pales in comparison.”

When we think of the future our children or grandchildren will live in, depending on our choices between even slightly more or less restrictive economic policies today, we could be plausibly looking at a future of widespread and affordable space travel, life-changing education and remote work opportunities in the metaverse, new sustainable energy innovations, a biotechnological revolution in the human capacity for medical and psychological flourishing, genome projects and conservation investments to revive extinct and protect endangered species, and countless other improvements to the human condition. Or we could be looking at a drawn-out stagnation in poverty alleviation, technological advancement, and environmental progress. The difference may well hinge on what looks today like a tiny change in the rate of compounding growth.

At the broadest level, more wealth in the hands of the human species represents a greater capacity of humans to chart their course through life and into the future in accordance with their values. Like all profound and far-reaching forms of change, economic growth has a wide range of consequences, some intended and others unintended, many desirable and many others undesirable. But it is not a random process. It is directed by the choices of individuals, and allocated by their drive to devote more resources and more investment into those things they view as worthwhile. Ever since the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution, the investment in human values has been on balance a positive sum game, in which one group’s gains do not have to come in the form of another group’s losses. This is demonstrated by the upward trends in human flourishing since the global rise in exponential economic growth. Indeed, it is intrinsic to the fundamental difference between a growing and a shrinking or stagnant economy: In a growing economy, everyone can win.

This article was published at Libertarianism.org on 11/17/2023.

Blog Post | Science & Education

AI in the Classroom Can Make Higher Education Much More Accessible

For some school subjects, artificial intelligence can transform the landscape of tutoring accessibility.

Ethan Han — Apr 26, 2024

Summary: ChatGPT4 has demonstrated superiority in various student exams, revealing its potential to support academic learning and improve educational outcomes, particularly in test preparation. With its accessibility and affordability compared to traditional tutoring services, AI tutoring can help address the increasing demand for academic support, especially as universities begin to reinstate standardized testing requirements.

In 2023, OpenAI shook the foundation of the education system by releasing ChatGPT4. The previous model of ChatGPT had already disrupted classrooms K–12 and beyond by offering a free academic tool capable of writing essays and answering exam questions. Teachers struggled with the idea that widely accessible artificial intelligence (AI) technology could meet the demands of most traditional classroom work and academic skills. GPT3.5 was far from perfect, though, and lacked creativity, nuance, and reliability. However, reports showed that GPT4 could score better than 90 percent of participants on the bar exam, LSAT, SAT reading and writing and math, and several Advanced Placement (AP) exams. This showed a significant improvement from GPT3.5, which struggled to score as well as 50 percent of participants.

This marked a major shift in the role of AI, from it being an easy way out of busy work to a tool that could improve your chances of getting into college. The US Department of Education published a report noting several areas where AI could support teacher instruction and student learning. Among the top examples was intelligent tutoring systems. Early models of these systems showed that an AI tutor could not only recognize when a student was right or wrong in a mathematical problem but also identify the steps a student took and guide them through an explanation of the process.

The role of tutoring in education has grown in significance as more and more high school students have gone to college. Private tutoring is now a booming industry. Often you can find tutors charging anywhere up to $80 for test preparation with no shortage of eager parents willing to pay for their services. Tutoring has been a go-to solution for students to improve their grades outside the classroom. But more importantly, it has been a solution to improve their chances of getting into college, with many private tutoring services focusing on AP and SAT exams. This connection between college admission success and private tutoring costs has been a problem for parents who cannot afford the costs.

ChatGPT4 is available for $20 a month. Although the program itself can be used to answer questions and provide academic support, dedicated education websites have begun incorporating AI tutors to help with test prep. Khan Academy provides free courses on AP content and SAT exams and offers an AI-powered tutor for these subjects at $4 a month. Duolingo, a popular language learning app that offers university-recognized language exams, offers Duolingo Max at $14 a month. These tutoring services are accessible at your fingertips at any time. There is no need to schedule video conferencing calls, do background checks on tutors, or pay extra costs. Quality individualized academic support is available at a moment’s notice.

The availability of AI tutoring services is occurring at a crucial moment in education. As students become accustomed to post-pandemic life, student achievement across the nation still has not returned to where it once was. Despite that, many universities have begun reversing test-optional policies that had allowed students to avoid taking standardized tests such as the SAT. The demand for tutoring has skyrocketed as many new high school seniors struggle to meet the old standards of college admissions. Many school tutoring programs have not been able to provide the support students need, and private tutoring costs are only increasing.

AI has the potential to provide cheap and effective tutoring for these exams while being easily accessible. A Harvard computer science course has been able to incorporate ChatGPT to great success, using it to provide continuous and customized technical support and allowing professors to focus more on pedagogy. As technology improves, students will have more support for academic pursuits, opening an easier path to higher education but also allowing students to more easily explore academic interests beyond rigid classroom instruction.

Blog Post | Science & Technology

AI Is a Great Equalizer That Will Change the World

A positive revolution from AI is already unfolding in the global East and South.

Zion Lights — Mar 22, 2024

Summary: Concerns over potential negative impacts of AI have dominated headlines, particularly regarding its threat to employment. However, a closer examination reveals AI’s immense potential to revolutionize equal and high quality access to necessities such as education and healthcare, particularly in regions with limited access to resources. From India’s agricultural advancements to Kenya’s educational support, AI initiatives are already transforming lives and addressing societal needs.

The latest technology panic is over artificial intelligence (AI). The media is focused on the negatives of AI, making many assumptions about how AI will doom us all. One concern is that AI tools will replace workers and cause mass unemployment. This is likely overblown—although some jobs will be lost to AI, if history is any guide, new jobs will be created. Furthermore, AI’s ability to replace skilled labor is also one of its greatest potential benefits.

Think of all the regions of the world where children lack access to education, where schoolteachers are scarce and opportunities for adult learning are scant.

Think of the preventable diseases that are untreated due to a lack of information, the dearth of health care providers, and how many lives could be improved and saved by overcoming these challenges.

In many ways, AI will be a revolutionary equalizer for poorer countries where education and health care have historically faced many challenges. In fact, a positive revolution from AI is already unfolding in the global East and South.

Improving Equality through Education and Health Care

In India, agricultural technology startup Saagu Baagu is already improving lives. This initiative allows farmers to increase crop yield through AI-based solutions. A chatbot provides farmers with the information they need to farm more effectively (e.g., through mapping the maturity stages of their crops and testing soil so that AI can make recommendations on which fertilizers to use depending on the type of soil). Saagu Baagu has been successful in the trial region and is now being expanded. This AI initiative is likely to revolutionize agriculture globally.

Combining large language models with speech-recognition software is helping Indian farmers in other ways. For example, Indian global impact initiative Karya is working on helping rural Indians, who speak many different languages, to overcome language barriers. Karya is collecting data on tuberculosis, which is a mostly curable and preventable disease that kills roughly 200,000 Indians every year. By collecting voice recordings of 10 different dialects of Kannada, an AI speech model is being trained to communicate with local people. Tuberculosis carries much stigma in India, so people are often reluctant to ask for help. AI will allow Indians to reduce the spread of the disease and give them access to reliable information.

In Kenya, where students are leading in AI use, the technology is aiding the spread of information by allowing pupils to ask a chatbot questions about their homework.

Throughout the world, there are many challenges pertaining to health care, including increasing costs and staff shortages. As developed economies now have rapidly growing elderly populations and shrinking workforces, the problem is set to worsen. In Japan, AI is helping with the aging population issue, where a shortage of care workers is remedied by using robots to patrol care homes to monitor patients and alert care workers when something is wrong. These bots use AI to detect abnormalities, assist in infection countermeasures by disinfecting commonly touched places, provide conversation, and carry people from wheelchairs to beds and bathing areas, which means less physical exertion and fewer injuries for staff members.

In Brazil, researchers used AI models capable of predicting HER2 subtype breast cancer in imaging scans of 311 women and the patients’ response to treatment. In addition, AI can also help make health resource allocations more efficient and support tasks such as preparing for public health crises, such as pandemics. At the individual level, the use of this technology in wearables, such as smartwatches, can encourage patient adherence to treatments, help prevent illnesses, and collect data more frequently.

Biometric data gathered from wearable devices could also be a game-changer. This technology can detect cancers early, monitor infectious diseases and general health issues, and give patients more agency over their health where access to health care is limited or expensive.

Education and health care in the West could also benefit from AI. In the United States, text synthesis machines could help to address the lack of teachers in K–12 education and the inaccessibility of health care for low-income people.

Predicting the Future

AI is already playing a role in helping humanity tackle natural disasters (e.g., by predicting how many earthquake aftershocks will strike and their strength). These models, which have been trained on large data sets of seismic events, have been found to estimate the number of aftershocks better than conventional (non-AI) models do.

Forecasting models can also help to predict other natural disasters like severe storms, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires. Machine learning uses algorithms to reduce the time required to make forecasts and increase model accuracy, which again is superior to the non-AI models that are used for this purpose. These improvements could have a massive impact on people in poor countries, who currently lack access to reliable forecasts and tend to be employed in agriculture, which is highly dependent on the weather.

A Case for Optimism

Much of the fear regarding AI in the West concerns the rapid speed at which it is being implemented, but for many countries, this speed is a boon.

Take the mobile phone. In 2000, only 4 percent of people in developing countries had access to mobile phones. By 2015, 94 percent of the population had such access, including in sub-Saharan Africa.

The benefits were enormous, as billions gained access to online banking, educational opportunities, and more reliable communication. One study found that almost 1 in 10 Kenyan families living in extreme poverty were able to lift their incomes above the poverty line by using the banking app M-Pesa. In rural Peru, household consumption rose by 11 percent with access to phones, while extreme poverty fell 5.4 percent. Some 24 percent of people in developing countries now use the mobile internet for educational purposes, compared with only 12 percent in the richest countries. In lower-income countries, access to mobile phones and apps is life-changing.

AI, which only requires access to a mobile phone to use, is likely to spread even faster in the countries that need the technology the most.

This is what we should be talking about: not a technology panic but a technology revolution for greater equality in well-being.

Blog Post | Education & Literacy

How to Combat Gloom and Pessimism

Given the inhospitable world we have evolved in, humans have learned to prioritize the bad news.

Marian L. Tupy — Mar 8, 2024

Summary: Optimism flourishes more in rapidly growing countries, fueled by the promise of improvements in living standards, a phenomenon less evident in relatively developed nations like the US. Human nature, predisposed to focus on negative news, collides with media outlets’ profit-driven emphasis on sensationalism, perpetuating a cycle of pessimism. Understanding our negativity bias and learning probabilistic reasoning skills can help navigate the deluge of alarming headlines, while seeking out sources of positive news can provide a more balanced perspective.

Surveys show that optimism is highest in rapidly growing countries that are catching up with the developed world. High growth rates allow the citizens of those nations to experience massive year-on-year increases in standards of living – something that, in the absence of an AI-led revolution in productivity, is unlikely to occur in already developed countries. Slow and steady progress, such as the one currently underway in the United States, does not seem sufficient to inspire widespread optimism about the future.

The problem of incrementalism is compounded by the interaction between human nature and the media. Given the inhospitable world we have evolved in, humans have learned to prioritize the bad news. Consequently, the media has embraced the “if it bleeds, it leads” business model. Worse still, growing competition between television, newspapers, and websites has significantly increased negative content over time. The inclusion of an additional negative word in a headline, for example, leads to 2.3 percent more clicks, according to a recent study.

Unfortunately, most people are unaware of our innate negativity bias. It may be helpful to include the understanding of basic human psychology in high-school curricula. While we may not be able to purge the negativity bias from our brains, understanding how and why we react to a ceaseless barrage of terrifying headlines in certain ways may help us gain a proper perspective on the world around us.

Another way to get around the apocalyptic headlines and focus on the largely positive trendlines is to develop a more sophisticated understanding of statistical probabilities. While evidence suggests that humans have an innate capacity for probabilistic reasoning, the formal application of Bayesian inference – which is to say, adjustment of our beliefs or guesses about something as we learn more information – is a learned skill. Infants and untrained adults show abilities that align with Bayesian principles on a basic level, indicating an intuitive understanding of probability and uncertainty. However, the precise and formal application of Bayesian reasoning requires education, especially in complex scenarios.

Finally, humans can choose what kind of information to consume. Knowing that traditional media does not offer a realistic picture of the world, people can sign up for services – such as the Human Progress weekly newsletter – that collate the positive happenings ignored by mainstream media outlets.