Public backlash grows when workers lack a way to bargain over AI

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 32:51

   um frankly quite a lot i think mainly for the reasons that you just described is like Like, you know, I think that people are correctly assessing that there are some folks in Silicon Valley who are taking a gamble on their futures, whether, and like you said, maybe the gamble is their jobs. Maybe the gamble is their literal survival. Maybe the gamble is if they believe that AI is a bubble, it's like a giant economic bubble.

2. 33:17

   It's true that like the AI is propping up American GDP growth, like, and it has been for the last year or so. So I think the St. Louis Fed said that 39% of growth in 2025 came from data centers and AI. And so when people sort of understand that they have no capacity for democratic control or having a voice over the direction of the technology, when the leaders of those technologies are being very open about the risk that they think it's going to pose and saying, hey, we're going to do it anyway, for normal people, they actually have no leverage, right?

3. 33:47

   They don't know anyone who works in an AI lab. They can't just tell them like, hey, like you should worry about this. Most policy action has been extremely limited. Most people don't know anyone in AI policy anyway. And so I think that when I see things like data center protests or booing at college graduations or whatever, I don't necessarily think that they're the smartest levers to make AI safer or whatever.

4. 34:14

   But I think that they are the only levers that people feel that they have access to, right? And like, again, like, yeah, maybe Waymo is a little bit safer. Maybe Chachi BD helps me write my emails faster. I think people are willing to cop to those particular things. But when write my emails faster is sort of positioned against this might take my job and kill us all. It just doesn't feel like that good of a trade.

5. 34:37

   And yeah, you know, then the AI people will say, but it also might cure cancer. And they'll say, where is the cancer cure? Like, I hear this all the time. It's like the AI CEOs keep talking about curing all diseases. Where are the cures to the diseases, right? At a certain point, you're just not a credible actor anymore. And so I understand why the populist backlash is happening. I would like to see it funneled towards like maybe more what I see as productive policy aims and protesting data centers and booing people at graduations and whatever. But it kind of makes sense to me. Yeah. Yeah. Something else that we're seeing, right? Well, we're already beginning to see these kinds of AI populist type attitudes beginning to escalate. So recently there have been some attacks on Sam Altman's house and also on the house of, I think, a councilman who had

6. 35:33

   just approved a data center project. Obviously these things are extremely horrific. Yeah, I think what I wanna know from you is what you think the natural trajectory is for these kinds of attitudes and behaviors. Are you anticipating that AI populism is going to start influencing political campaigns a lot more? Are you sort of envisioning that there'd be some kind of like, I don't know, like Luddite style revolt in which like rather than smashing looms, people are attacking data centers. Like, how do you see this playing out? All of those things seem pretty possible to me. So like in the U.S., we have the midterms this year and we have a big presidential campaign in 2028 where we're expecting both a very crowded Democratic and Republican primary. And one is like, I think that there's going to be a lot of political opportunism, some of it justified and some of

7. 36:30

   which centers AI probably even more than it needs to be. Because I think AI is kind of a perfect political boogeyman also. One interesting thing I noticed is like, while I do believe in a lot of the AI risks being very serious, you also notice that politicians will use AI as a justification for the thing that they already wanted to do. So like for Elizabeth Warren, it's like, oh, I want to tax the companies and we should do it because of AI, you know, or for people who wanted to regulate how much kids had access to technology for social conservative reasons. They're like, and we should do it because of AI. And so I'm already seeing some of the candidates who we expect to be running in 2028, whether it's like Mark Kelly or Ro Khanna on the Democratic side, maybe Josh Hawley on the Republican side, they're already sort of announcing these like big,

8. 37:13

   bold AI action plans because they see AI as a new issue that Americans are extremely scared about, And that creates an opportunity for them to define their campaign. And so because they're all going to be running these ads and talking about these AI companies, because AI companies are also, like, frankly, not very sympathetic to most Americans right now, I actually expect populist backlash and public salience of AI to increase quite a lot as these campaigns kick into motion.

9. 37:38

   Because politicians have an incentive to talk about AI more in order to justify their policy proposals. The other thing that I think about is these more diffuse and volatile forms of backlash, such as political violence, as we've sort of seen against these actors, such as even things like sort of these witch hunts. So like in creative communities among artists and among writers, there are kind of informal cancellation witch hunts against any writer or artist who is suspected of using AI, who partners with an AI company, et cetera, et cetera.

10. 38:11

    One thing that I think about is in, you know, the 20th century, we had a big wave of factory automation where a lot of the factories went from primarily humans on factory lines to humans managing machines more so. And part of the way that this was negotiated, such that there was not a massive backlash and there weren't waves of violence by workers who were being automated, was that these factories were mostly unionized.

11. 38:36

    And so when they were mechanized, the people coming with the machines would meet with the union leaders sit down at the bargaining table and say, okay, like, first of all, we're going to pitch this to you as it actually makes your job safer. You guys are really worried about workplace accidents and this is going to reduce that. So it gets at this issue that you guys are really worried about. We're going to actually tie wage increases for workers to the increased productivity of these factories. And also you had just had this new social contract that FDR introduced to introduce like, you know, better working legislation in general. But more importantly, I think that there was a bargaining table and there were these sort of mediating institutions of the unions between the people who were impacted by automation and the people introducing the

12. 39:16

    automation. One really interesting thing I think about today is that there are no mediating institutions of that form. If you are a white collar worker in most industries, you are not part of any sort of organization that is any sort of union or whatever. And so when your boss decides to maybe introduce AI, consider eliminating your job, there's not actually anything that you can do about it. There's not like a particular democratic or collective channel to express how you want AI to be incorporated into your life or your workplace. And I think that means that when people are really pissed off, they start going for social media cancellation and stochastic violence and all these more diffused forms of political backlash.

13. 40:00

    I think I just have a view that like people, public sentiment will find an outlet. And right now, we're just going to see quite a lot of it from very different directions, at least until people feel sort of credibly reassured that they will have the downsides cap, that they will share in the growth that AI gives, etc.