“At Asilomar, they looked at the real US economy, the real reasons for the “hollowing out” of the middle class. The problem isn’t immigration—far from it. The problem isn’t offshoring or taxes or regulation. It’s technology.” — Cade Metz, Wired.com
AI is going to replace far more jobs in the US (and elsewhere) than outsourcing labor ever did, and unless we prepare for that now, we’re going to have another economic collapse when millions of unskilled/low-skilled workers are replaced by software. One solution is the UBI, universal basic income, which will never fly in the US in the current climate. A more practical solution is retraining. You can’t just replace jobs with machines. You replace jobs with AI and then you retrain the people whose jobs have been obsoleted. But who pays? The corporations using AI won’t want to foot the bill. The whole reason they are replacing people with AI is to save money. It will be left up to the government then, at state and federal levels, to step up. But with a GOP majority intent on reducing government size and spending, this likely won’t get done. So in the end you will have another great wave of US unemployment and possible economic collapse that could have been prevented by simple worker retraining programs.
Forget the Baby Boomers. (Sorry, I love you, but you guys still use AOL). To my Gen-X and Millennial-aged friends: let’s craft a better plan for the next decade, because AI is coming faster than any of us are prepared for.
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