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A PMC Revolt Will Hold Us Back From The Glorious Automated Future
I've heard a few variants on this. When Tyler Cowen was on Dwarkesh, he said that people will be the bottleneck to automation. His prediction seemed part mechanistic, but part hearkening to the Luddites, that automatable members of the PMC will band together to do whatever it takes to save their weak, deplorable skins. Pass destructive policies, regulations, restrictions, maybe even try to physically break the machines. A minor variant on the Woke Capitalist Wrecker, if you will; the PMC wrecker.
Some might be concerned that these sorts of predictions are a bit vague. What will they actually do? What will it look like? How could we watch events unfold and categorize what is happening? Of course, as the old joke says, fascism comes with smiley faces and McDonald's, so it's unlikely that their activities will be immediately apparent on just a surface glance. Thus, I will turn to the impetus for this post and submit that one need look no further than current events.
This morning at the gym, I listened to Phil Magness, an economic historian who specializes in tariffs, on Reason's Just Asking Questions Podcast. Then, when I got home, I read Alex Tabarrok's latest on Marginal Revolution. They both pointed out something that I had not realized. America still manufactures a lot of value. More value than ever before in history. In real terms. So why all the hullabaloo about manufacturing? Jobs. And why are jobs somehow impacted? It can't be that China has stolen all of the manufacturing value add from us; we've already established, from the data, that we're doing more of that than ever before.1 Nah... it's automation. We're manufacturing gobs more value with fewer human laborers.2
This is the backlash to automation. This is the "wrecker class" implementing destructive policies in response to being automated away. This is just what it looks like. It doesn't say it on the tin. The talk is always about jobs, but the blame is misplaced for why they're going away. It's automation. It can cause people to reach for whatever tool can possibly cause shortages and contract the economy, just hoping that doing so somehow reverses the impacts of automation. Nevermind that the intermediate steps are "cause shortages" and "contract the economy".
If you're worried about how the PMC will eventually sabotage the progress of automation or just want to find a way to model how humans might be a bottleneck on the way to a glorious automated future, one might need look no further than current events.
1 - Perhaps one wants to just compare total manufacturing value add. China does have approximately double of that than the US does. China also has approximately four times the population of the US.
2 - It also does not seem to be purely a population growth phenomenon.
I feel like all these issues are always multi-causal and overdetermined. To make a comparison, it seems clear to me that since the rise of Obama, there were a bunch of really powerful forces that decided they were interested in using the wedge of "spreading LGBTQ+ rights" as a pretext to push more American power and influence into lots of other countries. Or the cause of black Civil Rights in the aftermath of World War 2 gave much wealthier, more powerful Northern interests a pretext to push for massive development in the American South, fundamentally altering its character (in many cases against the will of many interests that were locally powerful but weak compared to Northern money and social power). In each case, there were obviously lots of true believers, but there were also powerful triangulators who massively amplified these narratives in the public because they could be used to pursue other goals they considered important.
I'm not sure if it makes me a conspiracy theorist, but I have this sense that there are very big, very powerful, very important forces - non-partisans ones - that are less noisy and fractious and attention-seeking than Trump + friends, who have come to see the giant gamble starting in the late 90s of integrating China into the world economic system as a world-historical gamble that has proven to be an existential mistake, at least on the terms that it has evolved. Maybe I'm wrong, but I get that sense. And so there needs to be some public, noisy, easy-to-understand narrative to walk parts of that back, and to rebuild America's military, and to get normie young men to identify with defending a homeland and to start families and to raise kids, and to convince Europeans that they need to defend themselves and to regain something like an internal sense of nationalism (which being pissed off at Americans might ironically inflame and facilitate, as seems to be happening in Canada) and a willingness to actually make material sacrifices to make that all possible. There needs to be something like the 1980s again, basically, in much of the West. If you ignore belief in universal principles and stick with realpolitiks, globalism seemed unambiguously useful to many powerful American interests in 1998, and now we've reached a point where, at least for certain aspects of it, that's not so clear. If you go along with this argument, local automation absolutely isn't a threat to these powers that be - in fact, it's crucial. Chinese manufacturing broadly (specifically where they can piggyback from it to engage in a massive military buildup that leverages it) absolutely has evolved to be a threat to such powers. And if you're onboard with this theory, you would expect the public narratives that get the most oxygen to be the ones that are most aligned with reorganizing America's global system to protect against a rising China, rather than ones that, say, take automation seriously.
I'm not saying that makes true believers in manufacturing=jobs fake or anything, any more than people for whom Civil Rights occupied a sacralized moral status were fake. That stuff is out there and it is real. The existence of decaying parts of the Rust Belt is real. Many families cultural memory of the role that well-payed manufacturing jobs played in buoying their communities and giving them a sense of pride are real. People with those concerns are always out there. But the question of why it's getting so much oxygen now, why the megaphones are amplifying the narratives they are, is a different story, or so it seems to me. That's my speculation, anyway.
One wrinkle that I wonder about, regarding its applicability… If you look at what customer service jobs have been outsourced, they’re jobs that interface with the general public. I’ve worked in finserv for a couple decades now, and there are still niche customer service jobs around provided the customer base is wealthy. This may be either for high net worth individuals, or for business to business customer service. The wealthy have made it be known to their service providers they do not want to talk to John unless John’s legal name is John, and not if it is actually Ramesh.
I speculate that we will see similar for AI. The masses will get chat bots named John. The wealthy will pay to speak to a meatspace John.
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