AI's Great Stink

In July of 1858, the River Thames turned into an open sewer so foul that Parliament soaked its curtains in chloride of lime and fled the chamber. The heat of that summer lifted the stench of human waste—six feet deep in places along the banks—into the nostrils of the men who governed the world's largest empire. This was the Great Stink, a direct result of the rapid industrialization of London, when industrial affluence turned to organic effluence in the streets of London.

We are living through another Great Stink. Artificial intelligence has achieved the technological equivalent of indoor plumbing: it works, it spreads, it is installed in every home. But the sewers (legal frameworks, economic safety nets, and other norms and institutions that might contain its slop) do not yet exist. We have installed the flush toilets without building the pipes, and the waste pools in our public squares.

This pattern is older than the Victorians. Johannes Gutenberg's movable type spread across Europe from 1450, and within decades the scribes (the knowledge workers of their age) watched their livelihoods dissolve into irrelevance. The Catholic Church responded not with adaptation but eventual prohibition, compiling the Index of Forbidden Books, burning texts, and executing printers. But this only hastened its spread. Martin Luther's 95 Theses circulated faster than authority could comprehend, let alone contain, as the technology outpaced the social plumbing by generations.

The UN's economic research notes that technological breakthroughs typically wait decades before affecting aggregate economies because "complementary investments... take time to build out." Their research omits the lived experience of that transition: the cholera outbreaks in Manchester where 15,000 persons lived in cellars; the cesspits overflowing into streets where families crowded six to a room; the infant mortality that claimed more than half of all children of mill workers dead before age 10. The infrastructure always lags, and people drown in the gap.

The Victorians solved their crisis not by abandoning plumbing but by building what the sanitarians called the "water carriage" system, 1,000 miles of sewers and 318 million bricks designed to move centuries of human waste. We are fortunate that AI more closely resembles the Great Stink; The printing press found its plumbing too, but the pipes were laid through a century of religious war, the sack of Rome, and tens of thousands burned at the stake before Europe arrived at something resembling a literate public and a press it could live with. The question before us is how long we will breathe through soaked curtains before we start laying bricks.