by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I generally like Jason Calacanis and his array of tech-themed podcasts. I blanched when the All-In podcast had kook Robert Kennedy Jr. on, but I’m willing to forgive such a dumb mistake.
Anyway, the point of this post is to address how Calacanis’ seems to have a rainbows and unicorns take on AI and the future of work. As the on-going Writers’ Strike indicates — AI isn’t going to make people more productive, it’s simply going to transform the economy to the point that a lot of people simply won’t have a job anymore.
Now, I’m a strong believer in the notion that technology generally generates more jobs than it destroys. But the reason why I fear the AI revolution may be different is it’s all happening so fast that this process won’t have time to happen.
As such, I keep hearing Calacanis talk about how it’s going to make people more productive, and yet, he doesn’t seem willing to admit that lulz, if that productivity happens overnight that the capitalist imperative would be to simply restructure businesses so they have less workers.
And the way I could see this happening very, very rapidly is in the context of, say, a debt default by the Federal government leading to a Second Great Recession which, in turn, would cause a lot of businesses to look for ways to get rid of workers. All these people lose their jobs virtually overnight as a part of some sort of Petite Singularity…and those jobs just never come back. But we wouldn’t realize what was happening until the recession was over.
Anyway. I’m wrong all the time and maybe I’m just being hysterical. That is known to happen.
