When people ask me what artificial intelligence is going to do to jobs, they’re usually hoping for a clean answer: catastrophe or overhype, mass unemployment or business as usual. What I found after months of reporting is that the truth is harder to pin down—and that our difficulty predicting it may be the most important part of
In 1869, a group of Massachusetts reformers persuaded the state to try a simple idea: counting.
The Second Industrial Revolution was belching its way through New England, teaching mill and factory owners a lesson most M.B.A. students now learn in their first semester: that efficiency gains tend to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually somebody else. The new machines weren’t just spinning cotton or shaping steel. They were operating at speeds that the human body—an elegant piece of engineering designed over millions of years for entirely different purposes—simply wasn’t built to match. The owners knew this, just as they knew that there’s a limit to how much misery people are willing to tolerate before they start setting fire to things.
Still, the machines pressed on.
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Based on your description, I expected the article to be worthless (and it definitely was worthless!), but I didn’t expect the author to start breathlessly talking about Steve Bannon as if he’s some paragon of populist “AI safety” wisdom that transcends the Republican and Democrat parties.
For anybody who’s not aware, Steve Bannon is a key architect of the first and second Trump administration. And the fact that Bannon is part of the AI safety grift, which should be a red flag that it is a bad thing, this author twists it into a green flag that Bannon might be a good guy after all.