🌻 notes on AI, labor, and China

an expansion pack for my NYT story on the "permanent underclass"

This post originally appeared in Jasmi.News.

“While Silicon Valley has long warned about the risk of rogue A.I., it has recently woken up to a more mundane nightmare: one in which many ordinary people lose their economic leverage as their jobs are automated away.”

I have a new reported essay in the New York Times on AI, work, and Silicon Valley’s fear of the “permanent underclass.” It took 2.5 months, is 4,600 words, involved interviews with 50+ technical researchers, economists, and policy experts and policymakers; and is all-around the most ambitious piece I’ve attempted yet. (It’s also why I’ve been quieter here while finishing that up.)

I hope you read the piece in full (gift link for the subs <3), because it involves a bunch of deeper reporting on the AI labs’ perspectives and why this might be politically salient. I have been pleasantly surprised at the reception—I’ve received nice notes from Democratic and Republican politicians, researchers at every major lab, hardcore AI skeptics, and notoriously cranky economists. Most critics either seemed to struggle with basic reading comprehension, or were polite enough to subtweet instead of dunking (I’ll address them below!).

Here’s an excerpted summary:

Most people I know in the A.I. industry think the median person is screwed, and they have no idea what to do about it. I live in San Francisco, among the young researchers earning million-dollar salaries and the start-up founders competing to build the next unicorn. While Silicon Valley has long warned about the risk of rogue A.I., it has recently woken up to a more mundane nightmare: one in which many ordinary people lose their economic leverage as their jobs are automated away.

Most economists and A.I. experts do not expect [the most extreme] scenario, but the persistence of the permanent underclass idea should concern all of us. First, because it signals how much collateral damage the A.I. companies will tolerate en route to A.G.I. And second, because the production of a social underclass is a policy choice. Instead of waiting for impact, we need to think seriously — now — about how we plan to support workers through A.I. disruption.

The rest of this post is a ramblier, weedsier “expansion pack” for this story:

1. Perspectives on AI and work from my trip to China

2. Responses to job loss skeptics like Altman, Andreessen, and Klein

A Chinese perspective on AI and work

I finished writing the NYT piece while traveling across China with friends and family. It’s a fascinating place to be thinking about AI and jobs because the country has been experiencing high levels of urban youth unemployment for years—and not because of AI. I noticed after my China trip last year that there are striking similarities in the way that twenty-somethings in both countries talk/joke about economic precarity.

Starting in 1999, the Chinese State Council made a big push to upskill the population via mass college enrollment. This was an important bet for the country’s development, but it also skewed the balance of human capital vis a vis available jobs: China now has an oversupply of young knowledge workers and an undersupply of factory workers. It turns out many college grads would rather sit around unemployed than do backbreaking manual work.¹ Because of low levels of household spending, the Chinese service sector is smaller than in similarly sized economies. And because Chinese policy and finance favor state-linked firms, private companies face a tougher time growing.