Profound musings on AI (part 2 of a series)

Written 2023-06-02 - “The Ike Street Journal – the weekly diary of the American nightmare”

After composing my piece on the perils of AI last week, I realized that I had omitted one other danger that is being widely hyped at the moment: AI software taking over large numbers of jobs currently performed by humans, resulting in mass unemployment and social upheaval.

While ruminating on this looming menace I remembered an argument that I believe Keynes made during the Great Depression. I’m too lazy to look up the exact quote, but it was something to the effect that if things get really bad, we can always hire a bunch of workers to bury some silver in a mountain – and then hire another bunch of workers to mine it back out again.

Coincidentally, I then heard a commercial from a golf club manufacturer, and couldn’t help but wonder – isn’t the entire golf industry an elaborate version of this idea? We go to great pains to bury a small ball in a particular spot; then, we extract it and repeat the process.

Then, like a man with a hammer, I began to see nails everywhere. Take New York City infrastructure, for example. Granted, some infrastructure work is needed, in some cases urgently. However, as I walked around my East Village neighborhood I couldn’t help but notice the number of intersections to which the city had applied the following process over the past few years:

• dig up some pavement

• futz around for a week or two

• repave

• wait a month or two

• dig up the same pavement

• futz around for a week or two

• repave

• … repeat 10 or 20 times ...

Isn’t this also a variation of Keynes’ idea? And what about the East River Park that I used to walk to occasionally? By my vague recollection, it was extensively renovated some years back; then, a couple of years later, it was all shut down again so that everything could be excavated and moved 12 inches west because of global warming or something. Or, on a larger scale, what about the Second Avenue Subway – which cost approximately $2.5B per mile to build – 10x the cost in other locations such as Paris, Berlin, or Sweden. Might there be some Keynesian silver-burying activity there?

Or, on an even larger scale, what about lawyers and accountants in general? These professions do some necessary and useful work, but, if we took a sober look at the situation in the United States, I think we’d probably conclude a majority of their overall activity is in the Keynesian silver-burying category.

So, all in all, I think there’s grounds for some cautious optimism here. While particular occupations may indeed be vulnerable to disruption by AI, it seems society as a whole has largely already arrived at the strategy needed to adapt in the long term – and is well on the way to implementing it.