Good post, Brad. Right in spirit. But I want to push back on one thing.
Your worry about who buys the products if AI replaces all the labor assumes the displaced worker and the consumer market have to be the same population. NAFTA should've cured us of that assumption.
Capital can gut domestic labor, reroute production, and keep selling into the broader global market. The system can absorb an astonishing amount of local ruin without hitting an immediate demand wall.
That's also part of why UBI looks less like a solution here and more like a band-aid on a failing capitalist order. Ownership of the productive apparatus stays private. The public gets just enough income to keep consuming. The wage relation gets patched after the damage is done. More humane than abandonment, sure. But it's still preserving the same structure.
Your UBI proposal also reminded me of something I wrote last year. A letter to Kurt Vonnegut about Player Piano. Even the dystopia looked more materially secure than what we've actually built. Vonnegut gave his characters a basic income and called it a tragedy. We give people nothing and call it normal.
“Capital can gut domestic labor, reroute production, and keep selling into the broader global market.” sure, and they probably will, but that only creates jobs and consumers OTHER places, and turns the US into Idiocracy. Which… is not the end of humanity, buuuuuuuuuuuuut I’d call it less than ideal. It also is STILL just a stall, because if that happens, the economy power shifts to those other places, which causes the same inflationary issues we’re seeing building up in the place that have that economic power now. It’s still not a sustainable solution global, and isn’t even manageable in the short term here, imo.
If we don’t decouple the idea of working with survival, we’re boned. Whether that’s something like UBI or something else… who knows… but as long as “to survive you need to work” is a concept being stoked instead of changed… it’s a spiral that only goes one direction.
I think the deeper issue here is older than AI. For most of history, working for another man was seen as a lower condition. Shameful, really. Dependence lowered your standing. Then capitalism normalized that condition and, over time, turned it into a virtue. People got taught to tie their self-worth to their jobs, as if being useful to an employer were the measure of a life.
That’s why I think this is really a critique of capitalism. AI may accelerate the contradiction and make it harder to ignore, but it didn’t create it. It just adds fuel to the structure fire we call modern capitalism.
100% agree. AI, and the level of automation it will lead to (and already is, in some parts of the economy) is really just making it impossible to pretend the system is working. Until now most people could at least kinda get by, and a decent number did ok... but... that is collapsing for a large enough number of people that the system won't be able to absorb it like in the past, so unless we, as a society, move away from the "need" for work... most people are in TROUBLE... which really means everyone is, since money becomes meaningless if so few people have any that most people are cut out from that exchange altogether, and politically speaking, it's unlikely to happen before things get UGLY.
Hopefully we don't wait that long... but... I don't have a ton of hope about that.
I mean… we ARE fucked. It’s just the speed of the fucking that’s in our control I think. That came out wrong, and I’m not going to find a different metaphor haha
I'll be dropping the first part of mine sometime this weekend, its mostly done, will be a 3 parter. I'm going to try to extrapolate what I see as the likely effects of this disruption over the next 20ish years, we can already see the leading edge of it. The trap everyone seems to fall into is judging this by similar disruptions of the past. AI is not the cotton gin, first its coming for cognitive work, but the robots are fast coming and they will be at least as destructive as well. It's a one two punch.
We are vibing, I'm writing something addressing this as well, we will have to compare notes after. Seems like you are seeing the same problem with their logic that I see.
OH! I’ll be looking out for that then. Part 2 of this… whatever this is… is probably gonna drop monday or tuesday. Or i’ll go into a frenzy and post it at like 3am over the weekend (sometimes these things just HAPPEN haha). Can’t wait to see your take on the same thing.
Good post, Brad. Right in spirit. But I want to push back on one thing.
Your worry about who buys the products if AI replaces all the labor assumes the displaced worker and the consumer market have to be the same population. NAFTA should've cured us of that assumption.
Capital can gut domestic labor, reroute production, and keep selling into the broader global market. The system can absorb an astonishing amount of local ruin without hitting an immediate demand wall.
That's also part of why UBI looks less like a solution here and more like a band-aid on a failing capitalist order. Ownership of the productive apparatus stays private. The public gets just enough income to keep consuming. The wage relation gets patched after the damage is done. More humane than abandonment, sure. But it's still preserving the same structure.
Your UBI proposal also reminded me of something I wrote last year. A letter to Kurt Vonnegut about Player Piano. Even the dystopia looked more materially secure than what we've actually built. Vonnegut gave his characters a basic income and called it a tragedy. We give people nothing and call it normal.
That piece is here: https://www.thecorridors.org/p/a-letter-to-the-dead
“Capital can gut domestic labor, reroute production, and keep selling into the broader global market.” sure, and they probably will, but that only creates jobs and consumers OTHER places, and turns the US into Idiocracy. Which… is not the end of humanity, buuuuuuuuuuuuut I’d call it less than ideal. It also is STILL just a stall, because if that happens, the economy power shifts to those other places, which causes the same inflationary issues we’re seeing building up in the place that have that economic power now. It’s still not a sustainable solution global, and isn’t even manageable in the short term here, imo.
If we don’t decouple the idea of working with survival, we’re boned. Whether that’s something like UBI or something else… who knows… but as long as “to survive you need to work” is a concept being stoked instead of changed… it’s a spiral that only goes one direction.
I think the deeper issue here is older than AI. For most of history, working for another man was seen as a lower condition. Shameful, really. Dependence lowered your standing. Then capitalism normalized that condition and, over time, turned it into a virtue. People got taught to tie their self-worth to their jobs, as if being useful to an employer were the measure of a life.
That’s why I think this is really a critique of capitalism. AI may accelerate the contradiction and make it harder to ignore, but it didn’t create it. It just adds fuel to the structure fire we call modern capitalism.
100% agree. AI, and the level of automation it will lead to (and already is, in some parts of the economy) is really just making it impossible to pretend the system is working. Until now most people could at least kinda get by, and a decent number did ok... but... that is collapsing for a large enough number of people that the system won't be able to absorb it like in the past, so unless we, as a society, move away from the "need" for work... most people are in TROUBLE... which really means everyone is, since money becomes meaningless if so few people have any that most people are cut out from that exchange altogether, and politically speaking, it's unlikely to happen before things get UGLY.
Hopefully we don't wait that long... but... I don't have a ton of hope about that.
This is much more thoughtful than my "we are f*cked" article.
I mean… we ARE fucked. It’s just the speed of the fucking that’s in our control I think. That came out wrong, and I’m not going to find a different metaphor haha
I'll be dropping the first part of mine sometime this weekend, its mostly done, will be a 3 parter. I'm going to try to extrapolate what I see as the likely effects of this disruption over the next 20ish years, we can already see the leading edge of it. The trap everyone seems to fall into is judging this by similar disruptions of the past. AI is not the cotton gin, first its coming for cognitive work, but the robots are fast coming and they will be at least as destructive as well. It's a one two punch.
We are vibing, I'm writing something addressing this as well, we will have to compare notes after. Seems like you are seeing the same problem with their logic that I see.
OH! I’ll be looking out for that then. Part 2 of this… whatever this is… is probably gonna drop monday or tuesday. Or i’ll go into a frenzy and post it at like 3am over the weekend (sometimes these things just HAPPEN haha). Can’t wait to see your take on the same thing.