The Silver Lining to Chaos
Jasmine Sun has a longish essay in the NY Times entitled “Silicon Valley is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass”. It’s about the coming A.I. Jobs Apocalypse. It gives a good overview of what the optimists and pessimist think, but it boils down to this at the most optimistic:
Some analysts, like the economist Anton Korinek, of the University of Virginia and the Anthropic Institute, suggest that no human job is invulnerable in the long run, once A.I. can outperform humans at everything. Others, such as the M.I.T. economist David Autor, argue that new industries will emerge to meet infinitely unfolding consumer demand, just as our ancestors could not have fathomed the modern roles of flight attendants and software salespeople. Ultimately, the severity of disruption depends on how fast and how far automation goes.
But the debate over the most extreme scenarios conceals a more immediate threat: Even in the most limited case, A.I. will break the career ladder for millions of current and future workers, a prospect often waved away with euphemisms like “transitional friction.” The Oxford economist Carl Benedikt Frey puts it plainly: “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”
As with most things economic, the last group of people I tend to listen to are economists. No matter how smart and data-savvy they are, they have no idea how deeply their heads are up their ideological asses. Kind of like Supreme Court justices.
The truth is that with A.I. none of us knows, me included, what the impact will be, but if the hollowing out of the Rust Belt brought us the populist rage that enabled Trump, what will whatever is coming in A.I.Jobs Apocalypse enable?
If you’ve been reading here, you know that I think that Trump is a sideshow, a symptom of something deeper, and our politics as they are currently constituted is incapable of understanding or dealing with this deeper thing. Silicon Valley is the metonym for it, but it goes much deeper than a bunch of shallow tech bros trying to make some money. It’s almost as if the body politic elected Trump a second time precisely because it understands that our politics are incapable of confronting it and so don’t matter anymore. It was the electorate’s way of saying, “Trump? Sure, why not? What difference does it make?”
Are they wrong? I used to think so, but maybe not so much anymore. It’s not that I think that politics and democracy aren’t critically important. Of course they are. It’s just that I think we need a different kind of politics that is for now beyond the imaginations of economists, supreme court justices, media pundits, and almost every prominent public intellectual who has a platform. It has to have a different foundation than the one we currently have, and the Save Democracy folks, while I respect their good intentions, mostly don’t understand that yet, imo.
They want to restore something that’s been lost, but there’s no going back to pre-Trump. And maybe there’s a silver lining in that. Maybe he is clearing the way to create something new. The question is whether there are enough grownups among us with the good sense, imagination, and will to do it. They certainly aren’t in any branch of the current government now, or if there are any, no one is listening to them.
I doubt we can get to something more sane within a constitutional framework that values property rights above human rights. I’m all for the rule of law, but I don’t get all misty-eyed when people talk about the U.S. Constitution as if it were a sacred document on par with the Bible. Whatever its utility, It has been from the beginning a document that is shot through with injustice, and we’re reaping the fruits of its flaws now. The current Supreme Court is the reductio ad absurdum of its fundamental unfairness and inadequacy.
So buckle up. It’s going to be a very bumpy road for some years to come, but things need to be shaken up. Sclerotic, obsolete institutional structures need to replaced. We are clearly unable to make the needed changes by choice, so we must be forced to do it.
Jasmine Sun’s closing graf gives us the picture:
And what if we don’t act? What if we “let technology rip”? What if millions of people do lose their jobs to A.I., and nobody puts up the money or policy solutions to help them? In March, the Palantir chief executive, Alex Karp, spoke on a panel with the Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien. “The biggest challenge to A.I. in this country is political unrest,” Mr. Karp said. “If I were sitting here in private with my peers, I’d be telling them the country could blow up politically and none of us are going to make any money when the country blows up.”
Priceless. God forbid Karp’s peers be prevented from making any money.
Nevertheless, he’s right. That’s the track we’re on because there is no other yet. Perhaps Trump and an A.I. jobs apocalypse are the destructive forces that will force us to find something new, something that’s suited to the 21st-century reality than an 18th-century reality. I’d rather not have to go through all the political and economic disruption, but it’s important that the grownups among us face the reality that confronts us and start thinking about what the new thing should look like.