People Power III
In the industrial revolution, machines became a threat to the value of people’s labor. Many hands were replaced by a few hands. And in the short run, weavers and cotton pickers lost value in the production process. In the long term, the repetitive tasks that scar the human body and deaden the soul were rightly given over to unfeeling and tireless machines. This did not happen quickly but still, Luddites organized to try to stop this progress and the word sabotage comes from using wooden shoes (sabo) to jam the machinery.
In our current day information revolution, the introduction of the information machine, the computer, has cost jobs from typing pools to switchboard operators while opening many new jobs from coding to content creation. I still remember having to retype a whole important correspondence from one misspelled or mistyped word. What a waste of time that was. And now all of us carry a whole library, mailbox and newsroom in our pocket. Who needs paper? The empowerment has been huge.
Many commentators bemoan the smartphone’s ability to track and record everything we say and do. The proverbial Book of Life that will be opened upon our judgment day has moved from God’s hands to the NSA databanks. This is obviously an issue affecting people's power versus the government. And what is an exciting counterbalance, is the people’s power to record their leader’s actions too. But today, I want to explore the ramifications to the people’s power of the release into the economy of expert machine interfaces known as AI (artificial intelligence).
Few people have yet to realize the epic disruption of AI to swaths of information workers from lawyers and doctors to even writers and coders. We have created thinking machines that are not only better at storing and retrieving information, but the AI’s ability to democratically disseminate and apply knowledge upon demand at a cost approaching zero is an economic and social disturbance we can just taste the leading edge of today.
For example, the recent release of Chat GPT into the wild for free has made every coder in every machine language many times more productive… or redundant. Soon every one will be able to consult a digital lawyer for advice and to prepare legal documents at a ninety-plus percent reduction in cost. Even students in school can have nearly all their homework done by a computer at light speed and completely change the idea of education. The ramifications to people's power of AI are going to be at least as disturbing to the economy as the industrial revolution but compacted into one-tenth the time. Watch out!
It took a lot of time, money, people and infrastructure to build the thousands of power looms and cotton gins that took people’s jobs. Today, with the internet to disseminate information already established, one AI income tax preparation program can wipe out an entire industry and tens of thousands of jobs. The whole structure of the United States economy is about to be revolutionized the way offshoring manufacturing to Asia did over forty years for factory workers. Except this time it will happen in five years and will absorb the livelihoods and the embedded education of the bulk of our economy.
This will undoubtedly be disturbing to many individuals and it may even trigger a massive economic depression. Few people realize before the Great Depression of the 1930’s was a farming depression in the 1920’s after WWI. Farms became so productive that they were digging holes to bury the oversupply of livestock and grain. The productivity of the industrial revolution first drove down farm prices before it drove down ALL prices for goods and labor. We are on the verge of the same titanic forces of economic dislocation. What will we do?
What does it mean that our lives will no longer be driven by our work? For a majority of people the economic value of their current work could be rendered nearly worthless. Consequently, the meaning of life will radically change. One of our US presidents, LBJ, became a hobo for a while during the Great Depression so it’s not the end of the world. It could be a curse or an opportunity depending on your attitude.
What does this have to do with citadelization? Everything. From the Tower of Babel to Black Plague to the recent hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, any and all serious disturbances to routine life forces humans into components of strength and co-empowerment in response. If we see a tidal wave coming, what do we do…if we want to survive? Get to the high ground. And the high ground in the coming massive economic dislocation will be to make our lives easier and happier by moving in advance of the wave into defensive, co-empowering structures.
So find your tribe today. In advance. Think about how you can be of value to yourself and your tribe if money becomes either scarce or worthless. Remember the death of things is also the birth of new things. Invest some time remembering what made you happy and fulfilled before you had to get a job to pay the bills.
Just maybe we are about to discover a new level of freedom and invent a civilization we have yet to imagine. But that phase will only come after the death of the structures built upon the old way. How far we will fall depends upon how much we have rebuilt the solid foundations and new connections in our life we call citadelization.