If you accept the premise, that when the day arrives AI & robots can not only do most work but are far cheaper than humans, then we are in times of revolutionary change. The logical follow-up is how will that revolutionary change translate in terms of power and political structures?
OP’s point here is an interesting one. Less educated blue-collar workers have been losing for decades now thanks to automation and globalization. Yet they’ve lacked the power to do anything about it. Revolutionary change happens when counter-elites form at the top of society. These counter-elites are made up of the educated & what OP calls “failed elite aspirants” - in plainer language people who’ve gone into debt to be educated, but now can’t get the life they feel their education owes them.
Now that AI is coming for their livelihoods we can expect their reactions to be different, but how?
Have you read much of this fellow’s other work? It sounds fascinating.
Before reading the article, it’s something I’ve thought of too. Scott Aaronson, while he was on sabbatical working for OpenAI, wrote in a blog post that AI is conquering problems backwards to how we’ve expected, and I think that’s an interesting point. We thought we’d get robot maids soon enough but machines could never write a poem. Now, we have models that write poems voluminously, but we struggle to make even the simplest kind of everyday robot, which is self-driving cars.
We though it would go manual tasks -> science -> art, but it’s actually going art -> science -> manual tasks. There seems to be a relation of some sort between evolutionary time and training FLOPs. One can imagine a future where we all work as tradesmen for mysterious apps, repairing the guts of the server farms that actually run the world. But yeah, how will the present decision makers respond to being replaced? Time to see what this Turchin guy thinks, I guess.
Edit: Very interesting stuff! In particular, this is the first time I’ve heard about the bimodal distribution of lawyer wages.
As far as I can tell, the big shock to employment from LLMs is still just developing. I wonder what the exact perspective of one of these out-of-work lawyers would be. By definition, they’re highly educated, so the anti-intellectual reactionary trend won’t necessarily continue. I wonder if the far left will finally make the breakthrough that it’s been hinting at in the past.
I hope it manages to keep sight of nuance better than a lot of past ideological movements have.
Since we can foresee the effect of ChatGPT and its ilk on potentially creating large numbers of counter-elites, in principle, we can figure out how to manage it. The problem is that I have no confidence that our current polarized, gridlocked political system is capable of adopting the policy measures needed to defuse the tensions brought about by elite overproduction and popular immiseration. I hope I am wrong; but if not, prepare for a rough ride.
So is this from an American perspective? Other places have very different political dynamics right now. I have to wonder how this applies to my country in specific. We’ve been reforming at a very good clip lately.
It is indeed a very US perspective but I think the analysis applies broadly to all the western/developed countries.
The polarisation is seeping up here a bit, but it’s not nearly as bad, and there’s no gridlock to speak of.
