What do you think is going to happen after Artificial Intelligence fires all the office workers, replaces all the writers, and takes over running the world?
There are two things that can happen.
- All that value can go into the Cloud Czars’ pockets, or
- People can use it to make their lives better.
All the discourse surrounding AI today revolves around the first possibility. Today, the American system is set up for that to happen. The rich get richer and the poor go hungry. (Little Feat begins its last tour next year but they’re leaving us with a cause.)
This has been the initial threat of every major advance since the first power looms, over 200 years ago. But that’s not what happened in the past. Not because people are communists. It’s because if technology isn’t serving people, it has no function.
In the end civilization serves us or it can’t exist. The idea that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg are going to take all the benefits of AI for themselves and make us their slaves just isn’t happening.
Our forefathers didn’t stand for it, and neither will our children.
We have benefitted from technology of all kinds. Americans now live twice as long as they did when the industrial era started. It’s not because of organic diets. It’s because prosperity funded science, science discovered things, and engineers turned those solutions into a better life. No matter how things have gone in our politics, businesses have understood that the way to profit lies in a healthy market, and that serving customers is more even more important than serving shareholders.
Look Around, Look Around
While change has been less visible in my own lifetime than it was in the previous 70 years, it’s been real. The streets and our basic utilities do remain unchanged. But we have 100 great inventions crammed into mobile phones and the generic medicines we take save us from what killed our parents.
We also work less, or at least less hard. I’ve never dug rocks in a coal mine. Factory jobs require serious skills and pay like it. You can make a good living at home now. Few Americans, other than business owners, work more than a 40-hour week. Many protests against AI “stealing jobs” are conservative protests, people trying to maintain the autonomy the last 25 years have given us.
If all the wealth of AI went to the top, there would be nothing for that wealth to do. But it’s not going to trickle down. It didn’t trickle down for our forefathers either. Americans had to fight for their share of the pie. They had to organize, protest, and some even lost their lives.
Our kids will be doing the same, and they’re going to win, because there’s no alternative to human beings as the repositories for value. Money must stay in motion to be real, that motion must create value, and that value must be recouped by someone defined as its consumer.
