If AI is the Next Big Thing...

then what

Everybody is touting AI, and ChatGPT, and Large Language Models (LLM) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), that it’s going to change the world.

So I read Benedict Evans on “AI and the Automation of Work,” and he goes through the previous automation revolutions, from typewriters to adding machines to spreadsheets.

For instance, imagine the days of making copies of documents by copying out by hand. No wonder Bartleby the Scrivener said he would rather not.

Then there is Dominic Cummings who thinks that governments have no idea what harm could be coming from AI out of whack. And anyway, the politicians and the bureaucrats are too incompetent to figure it out.

And one commentator I read recently says the stock market is buoyant right now because of AI.

I guess I’ve been skeptical because I don’t see AI coming from crazy loners like the bicycle builder Wright Brothers and Henry Ford the mechanic but as The Thing from the gods of Tech. My Thing is that innovations don’t come from the Usual Suspects.

But if it does take off and completely upend the working world, what then?

That’s because I wonder if it is possible to have a technological revolution without millions of people being ground into dust.

That’s what happened in the Agricultural Revolution as landowners went for “improvement” and kicked the peasants off the land.

And that’s probably what happened with the white working class “dying of despair” as good old union jobs cratered in the “neoliberal” era and “offshoring” of manufacturing.

One of the conceits of our modern welfare state is that we help people that come on hard times.

Or do we? One of my lines is that labor laws helped to boost factory labor costs and make labor inflexible and unwilling to change when the market changed.

And do we help people by letting them check out of work into welfare?

On the other end, there’s an argument that government is to blame. After wars there is typically dislocation (and deflation during the gold standard era) which leads to strikes and labor unrest, as right now after the end of the COVID War.

My line is that there is no free lunch and you better go with the trend instead of battling against it. When I was working — and I worked for 28 years at the same firm — I was always nervous that I didn’t know what I was worth on the labor market, because as a salaried employee I was insulated from the labor market.

But obviously in our modern era the government puts out the notion that they will take care of the people. And politicians do that because that is what people want to hear.

Back in the day, when cities were new, a pestilence like the Black Death could decimate a population. In the War on COVID, it seems to me, government made things worse, and the reason was that it implemented a warlike “everybody follow me” culture that probably only works for an actual fighting war.

Can governments make things better, or do they always screw things up? I’m reading about Eastern Europe between the world wars and most of the countries started out as peasant societies and really didn’t have the resources or the smarts to help their countries industrialize.

I believe that the market economy is a near miracle that coordinates economic and social activity to a degree that none of us really understand and appreciate. And it works even though government is clumsily interfering to help its supporters and make other people pay.

Meanwhile, as the AI revolution gets going the government is spending billions on the “energy transition” away from fossil fuels. What could go wrong?

My line is that whenever something big happens, a bunch of people get thrown out of the system and never find their way back. And we don’t have a clue what to do to help them, as in The Homeless.