Comment by coffeemug
10 days ago
Another plausible future is AI reshuffling the economic hierarchy. In a technological civilization the pressure valve need not be political.
As an aside, you made me curious if Trump made this constituency materially better off. Here's what Claude thinks (tl;dr: it's a wash): https://claude.ai/share/36233694-3729-4758-b2e6-c2058791ab1a
Explosions are rarely productive. Populists are notorious for delivering lots of chaos and few results.
It's easier for everyone to just deal in the economic losers, but we didn't do that, and now they are burning the house down. This will not get them what they want, but they will continue doing it anyway.
Globalization was the test, AI is the final exam.
> Globalization was the test, AI is the final exam.
I'm not sure history will end so soon.
True, and we've been here before. The industrial revolution got rid of the need for most labor, which at the time was overwhelmingly agricultural and textile. We came out the other side OK.
But there was a lot of pain. Living conditions got worse and stayed worse for entire lifetimes before they got better, and they didn't get better because the people who won decided to deal in the people who lost, they got better because the world went to war and incinerated most of its capital, literally and metaphorically, and the regrowth happened under conditions of scarce labor rather than abundant labor, allowing the people on the bottom to strike a decent deal the second time around.
That, uhh, won't happen the same way again. Now we have robots and nukes. But it's true that without the benefit of hindsight I'd have had an apocalyptic view going into the last kerfuffle, I'd have been wrong, and it would have been due to a failure of imagination. Let's all hope that I am wrong again, but the mechanism will again have to be a failure of imagination, and it takes a lot of optimism to fit my hope squarely inside my blind spot.
3 replies →