🤖 ChatGPT: The rise of generative AI and (again) the rise of fears about technological unemployment

Also: 5 Quick Questions for … Kevin Cannon on space mining

“We who explore the future are like those ancient mapmakers, and it is in this spirit that the concept of future shock and the theory of the adaptive range are presented here — not as final word, but as a first approximation of the new realities, filled with danger and promise, created by the accelerative thrust.” - Alvin Toffler

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The Essay

🤖 ChatGPT: The rise of generative AI and (again) the rise of fears about technological unemployment

➡ “If workers are going to be replaced by robots, as will be the case in many industries, we're going to need to adapt tax and regulatory policies to assure that the change does not simply become an excuse for race-to-the-bottom profiteering by multinational corporations” —Senator Bernie Sanders, It's OK To Be Angry About Capitalism, 2023

➡ “If I were president [I would] say to the DOT, Department of Transportation, ‘We're not letting driverless trucks on the road, period.’ Why? Really simple: Driving for a living is the single most common job for high school educated men in this country in all 50 states. … The social cost of eliminating their jobs in a 10-year span, five-year span, 30-year span is so high that it's not sustainable, so the greater good is protecting your citizens.” —Tucker Carlson, The Ben Shapiro Show, 2018

Late last year, I podcast chatted with Steve Fuller, a professor of sociology at the University of Warwick, about the ways technological progress and environmentalism might change the American political status quo. A bit of context: Fuller has long theorized that techno-optimists on “the old libertarian Right and the old technocratic Left” might combine to form a pro-progress Up Wing party. Meanwhile, the anti-tech folks from the “old conservative Right and the old communitarian Left” would combine to form a progress-skeptical Down Wing party. Black (“the sky’s the limit!”) versus Green (“keep your feet planted on the ground!”). From that conversation:

Pethokoukis: I see these Bernie Sanders-style populists on the left who are very skeptical of corporate power. And now we have conservative populists who also seem to be against big corporations. Both groups seem to hate Silicon Valley. There's also a lot of overlap on housing density. Yet on cultural issues like abortion, for example, these groups remain divided. Is that how you see it?

Fuller: I see that 100 percent. I don't know exactly what to do about it. It's a very strange situation. But I do think it does point to the fact that the conventional political parties are going to end up realigning at some point. In other words, they're both going to kind of break apart, not only in this country, but certainly in Britain, the same sort of thing is happening as well. What does politics look like under these circumstances? Because I think one of the things that contributes to the destabilization of people's finding a political home is the fact that the state — which typically was the thing that political parties were fighting over: control of the state and control over state power — the power that the state actually wields nowadays is diminishing. This is why young people, for example, don't vote. Because they don't see anything in it for them, because they're not sure that getting one set of politicians or another set of politicians is going to actually mobilize enough power to actually get things done. So I think that's also part of the background of this story; namely, that the state isn't something worth fighting for or fighting about anymore, in a certain way. It doesn't really anchor, as it were, the common political reality that people understand.

Whether or not Republicans and Democrats realign into more explicitly Up Wing (globalization, immigration, technological creative destruction)/Down Wing (nationalism, restrictionism, tech stasis) parties, each currently has large segments representing the latter. And it has been my concern since at least the late 2010s that the same societal impulse driving trade protectionism might also give rise to a strong neo-Luddite backlash against AI and robotics. The GOP turn against Big Tech and Big Business has only reinforced my baseline concern.