It seems everywhere I look it’s AI money and AI “progress” and not-so-clever way to pump up investment in AI. It seems the push to get ordinary retail investors, that is the retirement savings of ordinary middle-class folks, into expected IPOs for OpenAI and others is going ahead full-bore.
All of this at the same time the financial markets, the American ones at least, are completely decoupled from reality. Indeed, the war in Iran, which is effectively still going from and oil supply perspective, has barely stunted the ever-expanding bubble in the stock market caused by AI investment and the promise of a worker-less future.
I mean that is what the AI promise really is for investors. It’s a hoped for ideal where ideas can be made into products, whether virtual or physical, without the need for workers—that is the cost of paying workers—to make them.
And workers know it. Everywhere you look there are polls about young people not trusting AI, or workers not trusting AI, or people just generally thinking that Sam Altman is a dick. (Okay, that last one might mostly just be a non-scientific poll of me.)
Without question there is palpable concern over AI job replacement. But, as has been well documented in many pieces of journalism, it isn’t the working class that is fearful, it’s the white collars.
This has me somewhat excited. Not because I hope for some Marxist anti-bourgeois realization where everyone realizes they’re a worker and ends capitalism through violent revolution, but because some of this angst might end up reversing some of the the last fifty years during which we have broken capitalism.
Workers and white collar workers look like they may just get together in their worries over exploitation and unemployment. At least, I am kind of hopeful they will. Then, rather than seeking to destroy capital all together, we can work at fixing some of the anti-competitive, monopolistic, and corrupt systems we’ve allowed to creep into the Keynesian order than served capitalists so well for decades.
I just hope it doesn’t take the AI bubble consuming and then popping all of our savings before it happens.
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