No. of Recommendations: 6
It's an optimistic view. While the timeframe is opaque, it is clear that white-collar payroll as well as service personnel (like telephone-based customer support) are targets for using AI for cost saving (the list is rather long of impacted jobs). That means lower tax revenue to government.
If, hypothetically, 25% of national payrolls are cut, the macroeconomic fallout will be highly deflationary. While outfits, like Deere, might eke out a living on service contracts, there might not be enough spare change rattling around for McDonalds to thrive.
AI is a bigger deal in the effect on jobs than the industrial revolution, the Great Depression, etc. because there are no new job opportunities created.
Well, that’s one apocalyptic view. It’s also what car assemblers thought when Ford built his mass production line, what Luddites thought about the automated loom, in fact it’s what every threatened group thinks when a revolutionary new technology is introduced. (See: auto dealers & EVs). The reality is we don’t know what will happen, and it may be that bold new horizons open up as a result. Or, obviously, it may not.
What I am sure of is that people aren’t going to sit around and do nothing. They will continue to use their imagination and invent things, or work in the arts, or parent better, or do politics, or a thousand other things, and that somehow we will muddle along - and even more somehow, we will figure out how to pay for it.
We went from a society supported almost entirely by tariffs to one supported by the personal income tax, and along the way came up with capital gains taxes, sales taxes, corporate taxes, gasoline taxes and more, in spite of entrenched powers who would have preferred we not tax their products or businesses at all.
Just as I am sure AI will have many significant effects on society, I am equally sure it won’t be the downfall of the Republic. (The utter corruption here now might be, but that is a different thing.) I keep coming back to it, but there’s a song from a few years ago: “Don’t worry, be happy.”
After all, you can’t do much else anyway, right?
