AI Will Never Create Utopia
For some reason, I remain fairly active over on Hacker News. Maybe part of me sincerely believes that I can wade into the cesspool of "bootstrappers" and convince a few that, y'know, maybe we should be more collaborative instead of focusing on building moats and concocting startup exit strategies. Maybe part of me just really hates myself, and that out of the glut of tech roles available to me, I focused on IT instead of software development, forever sacrificing the potential of earning dolla dolla bills in favor of a continuous cycle of outsourcing, offshoring, and panic-hiring domestic talent to fix fires at below-market rates. Or heck, maybe I just believe that my uniquely-lived experiences might offer the insight someone else needs to escape the pitfalls of the modern hypercapitalist hellscape boiling our planet and slurping up water in order to drive teenagers to suicide.
Whatever the reason, I find the occasional payoff in the odd "real world statistics throw sand on the hype engine and popular narrative around technology" thread. This week's case in point: CNBC reporting that AI adoption has reduced entry level roles for youth workers by 13%. Sifting through the comments reveals the usual assortment of eChuds attempting to paper over yet another stinging rebuke of their chosen technological savior.
Like Havoc, the current top commenter:
Not sure what these guys are studying but can tell you in the real world - essentially zero AI rollout in accounting world for anything serious.
We've got access to some fancy enterprise copilot version, deep research, MS office integration and all that jazz. I use it diligently every day...to make me a summary of today's global news.
When I try to apply it to actual accounting work. It hallucinates left, right & center on stuff that can't be wrong. Millions and millions off. That's how you get the taxman to kick down your door. Even simple "are these two numbers the same" get false positives so often that it's impossible to trust. So now I've got a review tool that I can't trust the output of? It's like a programming language where the equality (==) symbol has a built in 20% random number generator and you're supposed to write mission critical code with it.
Sure, I agree with their latter statement about these tools hallucinating - I'm an AI doomer, after all - but the lead-up reeks of denial about the very real impact these tools are having on job displacement. They're not alone in this position, either: threads, YouTube videos, BlueSky, Mastodon, everywhere outside of X is full of hot takes that these tools won't, can't displace workers, and that obviously this is all just a giant grift on the masses to funnel money into the pockets of the wealthy. They all make a classic assumption about these AI tools: they're unreliable garbage replicators, and therefore are doomed to failure because they cannot replace humans at their best.
This assumption is flawed, because rich people don't care if they're unreliable garbage fires - they only care that they're good enough to replace workers some of the time. Who cares if it results in the odd high-profile story about someone exploiting a chatbot for cheap airfare, or if it's dumbing down specialists and subject matter experts at alarming rates; if the chatbot can replace 20% of labor, then that's 20% more money for shareholders, the reasoning goes.
More fundamentally, it's a flawed assumption because it's ascribing morality and ethics to a cohort of humanity that better resembles sociopaths and serial killers in their actions, rather than intelligent life. It's assuming that the biggest proponents of AI - Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Dario Amodei, Larry Ellison - all truly have the best interests of humanity at heart, that they will undoubtedly use their newfound power and wealth to fix humanity's multitude of ills. It assumes that the rich, knowing they share the planet and its future with us, will eventually capitulate into doing the right thing.
They will not, because they are fundamentally not like us.
Amassing Wealth is a Disease
Let me be clear, so there's no room for ambiguity: there is no such thing as a good, ethical, or moral billionaire. This extends downwards quite a ways, inclusive of anyone at present who is primarily engaged in the accumulation of extreme personal wealth. My reasoning for this position is extraordinarily simple: to have the intellectual capability to successfully amass immense wealth, you also have the capability to understand the harms you will cause others in the pursuit of such a goal - and chose to ignore those harms in the interest of personal wealth accumulation.
In other words, every single person who is focused on personal wealth to that extreme is consciously choosing to harm others, because to grow your wealth to such a point requires violence to acquire it. This, fundamentally, makes them a bad person. This isn't up for debate, as we have millennia of evidence demonstrating the harms created through extreme wealth inequality in societies and the associated pivot of fiscal wealth into political power, conflating financial success with good leadership traits.
What is seemingly up for debate in present AI circles is whether or not these rich fucks are acting in our best interests, even if we disagree with their methods. The clear and obvious answer to that is: NO.
The singular, openly-stated goal of the AI wealth class is personal enrichment and societal destruction. That's not personal hyperbole, either. Peter Thiel, the alleged vampire, possible fascist, and seemingly self-loathing gay man who bankrolled a lawsuit by Hulk Hogan to demolish Gawker, can't even defend his own tools and policies when asked if they'll destroy the human race. The glib commentary from these ghouls - and the callousness and disdain with which they treat their own workers - paints a clear image of the future they envision for themselves: one where the working classes aren't part of it.
If there was any other goal for AI other than that, then the proponents are doing a phenomenally shitty job of clarifying it. They seek to displace labor permanently, yet never have an explanation for how people are expected to survive in a society where labor is required for income, and income is needed for basic necessities. They all agree that's the Government's problem to solve while simultaneously shoveling cash into the coffers of politicians to ensure that problem is never actually solved. Look no further than serial grifter and human trash fire, Senator Ted Cruz, to see the real goals of AI companies.
Death or Taxes
The United States' history of union busting is gruesome, vile, and abhorrent. The last time things were this bad was just before the Great Depression, where the labor markets looked very similar to those of today: high precarity, decreasing safety standards, rising violence, the use of military force against "undesirables", increasing automation, workforce displacement, private police and mass surveillance. So, too, were the problems of wealth inequality, asset hoarding, rent extraction, and political capture. It's little wonder that those with even a cursory understanding of history are drawing parallels between then and now.
What most people get wrong, however, is ascribing our exit from the Great Depression to our entry into World War 2 and its effects on global logistics, manufacturing, colonialism, and resource extraction. That certainly helped create the American Hegemony that would follow, but the only reason we had the ability to enter the war in the first place was because of the New Deal. Surprising none of the working class (and fiercely angering the monied classes), it turns out that social liberalism tenets like a mixed economy, expansion of social services and civil rights, and government jobs programs fuel growth. The New Deal brought all of those and more to an America that was willing to try anything to get out of its decade-long depression, building much of the infrastructure we have today but was neglected by our neoliberal elders.
One particular pain point for the monied classes were taxes. In 1925, in the prelude to the Great Depression when the Roaring 20s were in full swing and the US stock market reached record highs, the income tax rate of the highest earners was a measly 25%. This was a stark reduction from its prior high 77% during the midst of World War 1, during which Capital Gains - how the rich actually make their money - were taxed at a maximum of 7%. By 1925, Capital Gains taxation had risen to 12.5%, and remained at that level through the start of the Great Depression in 1929 - by which point the Dow Jones Industrial Average had more than quadrupled in value since the turn of the century. When the Great Depression arrived, so too did heavy taxation: top income tax rates were 63% at the start of the depression, and 91% during the "golden era" of the 1950s and 1960s. Capital Gains taxation similarly rose, with stronger incentives on longer-term investments instead of shorter-term holdings, including exemptions of up to 70% of earnings from being taxed.
This was a necessary compromise. Rich people aren't going to willingly give up their money without violence and the working classes, seeing their own corpses pile up in front of the private and government-backed armies in preceding decades, were happy to match violence with violence. By raising income tax levels on the richest earners, the government brought in the revenues needed for such social programs and government institutions needed to fight a second World War and lift the country out of the Great Depression; by granting careful exemptions on taxation for Capital Gains, a clear message of long-term investment and growth was communicated to Capital holders. It got everyone on the same page: "this won't be solved tomorrow, but if we follow through together, we will create a far richer society for our descendants." That was one hell of an undersell, though, as the New Deal's domestic investments and policy changes - along with our good fortune from WW2's outcome - didn't just lift us out of the Great Depression, it created a superpower that would reign supreme over the Western world for nearly a century (half that for the entirety of the world, albeit not continuously).
Thus, our crossroads back then could very well be viewed as a "Death or Taxes" scenario: we either die as a country by failing to regulate the worst excesses of Capital and business, or we tax the fucking shit out of everyone while also providing disproportionate return on investment in the form of highways, electrical grids, plumbing systems, water treatment centers, housing stock, mass transit, and other infrastructure that rapidly accelerated our ability to meet modern challenges. Capital was never going to commit its resources willfully to exiting the depression, and workers were never going to accept the precarity and violence they'd endured for decades prior; Government intervention was necessary to save both.
Which brings us to today, where Capital has all but eliminated permanent employment through an endless cycle of layoffs, outsourcing, gig work, and automation. A country where 93% of securities are held by just the top 10% of earners, where our infrastructure crumbles and fails through decades of underinvestment, where the media and politicians lecture us for failing to find decent enough wages to live on through our own means while simultaneously threatening our highest-paying jobs with outsourcing and displacement via AI. A decade of ZIRP has thrown gasoline onto speculative asset valuations, and workers are increasingly turning to populism on both sides of the partisan aisle, furthering political violence. All of this as popular media of the time revels in a continuous performative party, telling us everything is okay and that Capital knows what's best for all of us.
They say to trust the investors, trust Capital, trust AI, and that a utopia will appear. What workers intrinsically understand is that the utopia being pitched was never for them - and left unchecked, the utopia dreams of Capital will doom us all.