Vividity, vividly

How will voters react to the prospect of AI-driven job losses? There's two parts to this question: (1) How will actual job displacement occur (2) How will people perceive it, separate from the reality The second turns out to be crucial because, as Stigler long ago pointed out, we see links between economic performance and voting that far out-strip actual aggregate changes in employment. That is, the changes in votes are larger than the changes in jobs directly---so it's not literally the people being displaced driving the political change, necessarily. It's everyone else too and their perceptions, concerns, values. Because of this, it's really hard to predict how things will play out. In an old paper we wrote, we found that people whose homes were foreclosed on during the subprime crisis didn't become politically activated--actually, they turned out less, and their areas didn't punish incumbents (but may eventually have become more Trumpy). Right now, politicians are starting to play with how to exploit the issue. It's not super clear yet whether/where they'll gain traction, and the extent to which they do will probably depend heavily on whether people start to perceive AI as having noticeable effects on the economy as a whole. @davidshor 's polling suggests these concerns are very much at play in the electorate today. In parallel to the excellent work @alexolegimas and @soumitrashukla9 and others are doing on the realities of job displacement, we'll need to do a lot more work to understand how these politics will play out. Some basic questions: --Will people's perceptions end up being driven more by the local conditions in their area or in their profession? Or more based on national, macro-economic forces? Or in the language of Alex and Soumitra's post, will it be the truckers who mobilize, or the consultants, or someone else? --Will there be a clear partisan split where one party is perceived as stronger on this issue? Right now there are politicians in both parties exploring how to frame it. The Dems should have a structural advantage as the party currently out of power, but that can change quickly. Important and fertile ground for political econ folks interested in the links between AI, the economy, and politics!

Book review 📚 Artificial-intelligence models will supposedly take over the world, but AI innovator Luc Julia tells Nature that they’re little more than glorified pocket calculators go.nature.com/4lPpuPd

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