Don't wait for the AI shock

A WPA for the AI era

I wish I were more interesting, but I generally take the modal view that AI will wind up being a job creator, not a job destroyer, with two caveats:

1. In the short term, it’s almost impossible to imagine a scenario in which there’s not a ton of labor market displacement and economic churn.

2. In the long term, I could be wrong.

Either of those scenarios is good justification for some kind of insurance.

Everyone basically expects some kind of shock to occur, even if only temporarily. Whether that’s job loss, energy prices, a wave of cyber incidents, who can say. What we know is that if Something Big happens, there is almost certainly going to be a period of displacement and torque. We don’t know what it’ll look like but it feels inevitable that it will happen. So it seems obvious to take out / issue some insurance.

The default answer in this conversation tends to be UBI. But UBI is dumb and bad. It’s both too expensive AND doesn’t go far enough because it’s not productive. It creates a permanent underclass of government subsistence vs developing human capital. If people leave the workforce during the tumult, their path back into the workforce is hazy at best and their tendency to become antisocial is high.

Sam writes a lot about AI as a meaning crisis, not a job crisis. Even if we solve the income problem, we’re still left with video games, porn, and nihilism as a 24-hour job.

Better to develop human and physical capital through a public works project that encourages social cohesion and human flourishing.

We should be prepared for massive investments in physical infrastructure, human capital, and human flourishing:

• There’s a huge amount of shovel-ready projects in the country, and no amount of AI job displacement will solve the fact that all of our bridges are falling down.

• Human capital investments (health and education/childcare) increase the productive capacity of the economy over the long term

• And human flourishing (arts and culture) is a necessary condition for social cohesion. If we’re a rich society that’s going to become an ultra-rich society, we should engender the conditions for arts and culture. Otherwise, what was it all for?

Treating AI insurance as a jobs program vs pure redistribution is also a great hedge. If I’m wrong and there’s no risk of crisis, we’re still investing productively in human and physical capital AND it’d be much easier to end a jobs program than to undo an entitlement program like UBI.

Note: There’s also a very real possibility of other kinds of shocks that merit insurance and investment. Think biosecurity and cybersecurity. We are sticking our heads in the sand on this.

Not having insurance for something we think might happen and might be really bad if it does, on ideological grounds is just dumb.

If we don’t have smart stuff ready to go with broad buy-in we’ll do dumb stuff or we’ll do nothing at all and history will happen TO America.

Stray thoughts from my feed:

• Moral leadership requires moral authority and courage. You don’t get to whine about cultural/moral decay while actively promoting it. It’s fine to make money but maybe just shut up and dribble.

• The real American dynamism is not buying low grade cashmere from Quince. We can all do better than the same grey, made in China crew neck.x