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My new research piece: what the politics of jobless prosperity might look like in an AGI world, why the real political backlash to AI hasn’t started yet, and how the labs should prepare.
1. The backlash to AI isn’t here yet. There is anxiety among American voters, but there is no populist backlash yet, because the job losses haven’t started yet—and we don’t even know if they ever will. AI is not in the top 20 issues Americans say they care most about, and the AI policy issue with the most energy right now, data center opposition, reflects not just AI but also NIMBYism, as @mattyglesias has pointed out.
2. Real backlash will happen if and when unemployment climbs by two percentage points, because that’s where data shows we tend to see meaningful electoral effects of unemployment. At that point, if we do not have a good inventory of smart policy ideas ready, we could be overwhelmed with bad ones.
3. The labs should focus more on measurement, and less on dreaming up New Deals. There is tremendous uncertainty about what kind of job displacement there’s going to be. Instead of attempting to write a new social contract from the top down before Americans are even asking for one, the labs should be helping us all get more intel on whether, when, and how job displacement is occurring—building from the helpful data sharing they’ve already started piloting. This will put society in a better position to design policies that make sense for everyone.
In doing the research for this piece, I came to two broader realizations.
First, there is way more uncertainty than I appreciated about how the economics of AGI might play out, and there is stronger evidence than I appreciated that job losses from AI have not meaningfully started yet.
And second, if AGI plays out the way the labs are predicting, the politics will be very hard to forecast, because it will be the politics of “jobless prosperity,” with jobs falling while the economy grows. We have very little experience with this happening at this kind of scale, and it will break our typical models of politics.
For both of these reasons, we should all be really humble in making pronouncements about the politics of AGI. I hope my piece will be read in this light, as an attempt to reason about something that is super important but also super hard to forecast accurately.
You can check out a lot more in the piece here:
freesystems.substack.com/p/the-politics…
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