Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration will drive the next era of growth, wealth, and human flourishing. It’s a scary metaphor. Throughout American history, the drive for expansion and the very concept of terrain up for grabs — land grabs, gold rushes, new frontiers — have provided a permission structure for imperialism and exploitation. This could easily hold true for AI.
This isn’t the first time the concept of a frontier has been used as a metaphor for AI, or technology in general. As early as 2018, the powerful foundation models powering cutting-edge applications like chatbots have been called “frontier AI.” In previous decades, the internet itself was considered an electronic frontier. Early cyberspace pioneer John Perry Barlow wrote “Unlike previous frontiers, this one has no end.” When he and others founded the internet’s most important civil liberties organization, they called it the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
America’s experience with frontiers is fraught, to say the least. Expansion into the Western frontier and beyond has been a driving force in our country’s history and identity — and has led to some of the darkest chapters of our past. The tireless drive to conquer the frontier has directly motivated some of this nation’s most extreme episodes of racism, imperialism, violence, and exploitation.
That history has something to teach us about the material consequences we can expect from the promotion of AI today. The race to build the next great AI app is not the same as the California gold rush. But the potential that outsize profits will warp our priorities, values, and morals is, unfortunately, analogous.
Already, AI is starting to look like a colonialist enterprise. AI tools are helping the world’s largest tech companies grow their power and wealth, are spurring nationalistic competition between empires racing to capture new markets, and threaten to supercharge government surveillance and systems of apartheid. It looks more than a bit like the competition among colonialist state and corporate powers in the seventeenth century, which together carved up the globe and its peoples. By considering America’s past experience with frontiers, we can understand what AI may hold for our future, and how to avoid the worst potential outcomes.
For 130 years, historians have used frontier expansion to explain sweeping movements in American history. Yet only for the past thirty years have we generally acknowledged its disastrous consequences.
Frederick Jackson Turner famously introduced the frontier as a central concept for understanding American history in his vastly influential 1893 essay. As he concisely wrote, “American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West.”