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The Wages of AI Transformation
Back in the late 19th century — the Gilded Age we call it — the US was going through a staggering transformation, as Pennsylvania-born Salena Zito reminds us.
In the 1870s and 1880s, Americans were living through the largest economic transformation in the country’s history. In 1870, about one American in four lived in a city. By 1890, it was more than a third. Farmers watched corn fall from 83 cents a bushel in 1881 to 28 cents in 1890 while they paid tariff-protected prices for everything they bought. Mill towns filled with newcomers. Western Pennsylvania was where much of the future was being built: rails in Johnstown, locomotives in Altoona, coke in Connellsville, oil in Butler County, gas in Murrysville, and George Westinghouse’s alternating current in Pittsburgh.
Let’s put it crudely. In 1850, the US was predominantly an agricultural nation. In 1900 it was an industrial juggernaut, and trying a bit of world-power politics with the Spanish American War. And ordinary people got tossed around like tumbleweed in a storm.
When humans experience a transformation like that they mostly hate it; they hate the chaos and the end of life as they know it. And they particularly hate the booms and busts that go with it. There was the Panic of 1873 — mostly due to the monetary deflation after the Civil War. And the Panic of 1893, caused by a railroad bubble, the curse of monetary bimetallism and a few other business failures. Then there was the Crash of 1906 caused in part by the Alaska gold rush.
Today, of course, we are in the middle of the AI Bubble. And as Carlota Perez writes in Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, new technology usually follows an S-curve, and the bubble pops when the S-curve goes from increasing its gradient to reducing its gradient.
Right now, as Zito writes, the big issue is Data Centers, and everyone is opposed to having one in their back yard.
As usual, we peasants are missing the point. It’s not Data Centers that are going to ruin the neighborhood, or even the coast-to-coast nuclear plants that we will need to power them. It’s the loss of jobs.
My guess is that the migration from the farm to the factory will seem simple and beneficial compared to the workforce chaos that will ensue with AI. I keep seeing ads of corporate desk jockeys being blown away by Adobe’s AI products redoing their boring meeting slides into something amazing. But obviously the real changes will be in the vast corporate and government bureaucracies and their cubicle farms.
The last business revolution was the union manufacturing workers hitting the wall in the mid-20th century. The best and brightest weren’t really affected by that. But the AI revolution is going to hammer white-collar workers, from teachers to lawyers to administrators to regulators: the white-collar middle class. Put it this way: middle class white-collar workers are a lot more articulate than blue-collar union workers.
In the last few years we have been used to the Activist Industrial Complex and their Sorosian overlords and NGO intermediaries filling the world with platoons of activists and slogans and protests and rage. But I suspect that the divisions of disappointed corporate workers, the AI’ed lawyers, the old-school programmers and analysts will create a whole new world of activism that will make the Year of St. George of Floyd and the present unpleasantness in France look like a walk in the park.
And that is to say nothing of the army corps of government bureaucrats that are present cocooned in union-protected lifetime jobs. Right now state governments are all trying to raise taxes to pay for the pay and benefits and pensions of those useless employees, and that’s before AI really kicks in. I just have no idea how AI and government employees and elected politicians and eevil billionaires and angry taxpayers will resolve their differences.
| Wed, 28 Oct 2026 22:05:37 GMT |
Before the Dawn of Writing
I have been much impressed with Martin Gurri’s story of communications, from the invention of writing, to the invention of the alphabet, of printing, of mass media, of the internet.
And now, of course, AI.
It has inspired me to ponder a little about human communications before the Dawn of Writing. But not much. Obviously, I thought, humans communicated ideas and knowledge by speech. And also epics and fairy tales.
But I read a piece today at Quillette that really deepened my understanding. In “What the Navigators Knew” Patrick Whittle delves into the acquisition and communication of human knowledge and skills before writing.
There is We, the Navigators by David Lewis about the navigation knowledge and skills of Pacific islanders back in the day. All without maps and sextants: imagine! How did they find their way around the Pacific Ocean? Answer,
these master wayfarers could cross vast stretches of open ocean from tiny island to tiny island using an extraordinary range of environmental cues, including stars, ocean swells, currents, cloud formations and bird movements…
[The navigators] were human beings who had inherited and mastered a remarkably sophisticated body of practical knowledge, even if they didn’t always know why or how a particular practice worked.
Then there is The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Heinrich. It is perhaps a more general attempt to understand practical knowledge without modern science and communications.
Henrich offers a detailed and wide-ranging account of human cultural evolution, arguing that our species owes its success not simply to individual intelligence, but to the fact that culture allows us to accumulate, preserve and transmit knowledge across generations.
And part of that process is ritual and taboo.
[K]nowledge that is seen as sacred or taboo may be more memorable, more authoritative and less likely to be modified by someone who does not understand its purpose… Sacred rituals can therefore act as a kind of cultural safeguard by making important accumulated knowledge unusually resistant to potentially disastrous alteration.
In other words, don’t think of ritual and taboo as narrow minded and bigoted, but rather “culturally effective means of remembering and transmitting a hard-won practical lesson”.
It all dovetails, as Pinky Jerebohm would say.
What is scary to me is how much we humans have changed since the invention of writing, and how the speed of change has ramped up exponentially. The point about AI, for instance, is that we don’t really have to go to school to learn stuff. What you need in the AI age is the skill to ask questions.
Do you see the point? Back in the day, humans learned ritual and skills — think of childhood play and learning how to ride a bike — and learned what not to touch.
But now…
I suspect that we need to think deeply about how to acquire knowledge and skills — and to practice them — in the new AI Age. In other words, how do we live childhood now?
I don’t believe we have even started to think about all this.
| Tue, 27 Oct 2026 21:41:05 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts — Lord Salisbury
Socialism promises belonging but delivers isolation.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: A Manifesto About the Meaning of Life
