Like a Broken Clock... The WaPo's Megan McArdle

She writes presciently (for once) on how GenAI is coming for the cushier upper crust. This will not be good for society.

In today’s WaPo, there is a piece by Megan McArdle, the resident libertarian looney on the opinion staff at the Post, on how AI is going to do to the professional class what outsourcing did to the working class since the 1970’s.

Here’s the whole think, gifted link: “What Happens when the Professional Class Loses Out to AI?”, and she echoes what I have been thinking in relation to my career and the coming wall of AI.

First, for a better view, you should check out my man, Ed Zitron, at “Where’s your Ed at?” for the best objective review of the current state of AI, particularly the chat bot universe. He points out the flaws, and the voracious data that these engines ingest (much of it without permission, so lotsa plagiarism in the space, as noted often) and how it is really, objectively shit. Read this piece on “They’re Looting the Internet” for a taste, then go deep.

Before I get started, Megan is your typical small ‘L’ libertarian, who defends the position in the face of plenty of contrary evidence, so really like your nutty uncle that your parents shield you from because he is bat-shit insane. But occasionally she does make a good point. Today is such a day.

What she identifies is the fact that this wave of productivity improvements will affect the white-collar, professional class:

For I suspect AI is coming for a lot of professional class jobs, despite how many people I hear say a machine can never do what they do. We’re accustomed to think of automation as primarily displacing the working class, but as economist Daron Acemoglu wrote in 2002, “the idea that technological advances favor more skilled workers is a 20th-century phenomenon”; in the 19th century, steam-driven machines replaced a lot of skilled artisans, and AI currently looks to be pointed in a similar direction. If you work with words and symbols, AI can already do a surprising amount of what you can do — and it is improving with terrifying speed.

This feels spot on. In my other blog (tralfaz.com) I wrote a short series several years back on the confluence of factors that led to the rise of what is generally thought of as the “middle class” and at the time I mused how that was a precarious construct.

It seems that AI is going to make not the lower tiers of the middle class extinct, but much more likely to affect the top tier of the middle class, the “Professional Class” of people like attorneys, accountants, and a variety of professionals that are “creatives”.

This is a huge change from prior waves of productivity enhancements that hollowed out the lower end of the middle class, the blue-collar workers who entered the middle class by organizing, and collective negotiation via unions in the aftermath of the second world war. Those well-paid factory workers were decimated by first increased automation to reduce the number of bodies to perform a specific task, as well as the second wave of the productivity enhancement by outsourcing to lower wage and regulation areas.

The professional class watched this, reading about it in their WSJ, and the tut tutted that these people should have gone to college.

Guess what Buffy, this time you arrogant knobs are the ones who are going to be flensed¹.

Here are two paragraphs closer to the end:

Those people might be happier if AI improves their relative position — taking over an increasing share of high-status, high-paid knowledge work, while leaving humans the lower-skill tasks it still struggles with, such as chopping vegetables or helping an elderly person use the bathroom. In theory, perhaps, we should all be happier, as this would be what political leaders have long claimed they wanted: a return to the mid-century paradise when the college wage premium was modest, opportunity was broadly distributed, and incomes were compressed into a narrow band.

But if so, we are also likely to see a revolt of the educated people who are losing ground, similar to the revolt that led the working class to embrace protectionism, and Donald Trump. Or at least that’s how it seems to me, when I try to imagine the upper middle class offering their own kids the advice they’ve so liberally dispensed to working-class men: “I’m sorry, but the jobs your parents had aren’t going to be around, and it’s time to face reality and look for steady work in food service or a warehouse.”

She makes a powerful point, but she can’t avoid the dig at the advice for the lower rung members of society, the “get educated and get a better job”, or “be happy to work in food service or some other “disfavored” field.

Alas, the advent of AI actually reduces the gulf of skills between the factory or food service worker², and gives them the ability with the use of the tool to take over roles in marketing, advertising, and even program management roles in corporate America.

I will be blunt, I think that many CEO’s could be replaced with a Turing complete chat bot, but that is for a different posts.

Wrapping up

The coming onslaught of AI is already causing many corporations to trim staff, and to reduce the number of people doing a lot of the grunt work that drives much of the wheels of commerce. Some have outright fired people, replacing with a Chat GPT subscription, quality and accuracy be damned.

Some of them will realize this was bad, and many of my “professional class” peers believe that their output is so much better that they will be immune.

They are fooling themselves. Looking at the history of “Capital” and its relationship with Labor, the capital ‘C’ Capitalists will always take mediocre simulacra of labor over actually paying a skilled human to perform the task.

But, go read the Ed Zitron from above, his views and takes are pretty spot on.

And my profession? Product Management? It is going to be bleak. Someone is going to build a black box to do much of the work I have done for close to 30 years. Will it be better than what I have done? No. But it will be better than much of what I have seen enter the field (long story to explain, I might write about it on The Product Bistro) and managers will judge it “good enough” and be done with it.

I am supremely glad that I am nearing the end of my career, near the top of my game, hoping I can hang on for 5 more years.

Final pull:

Since the knowledge workers are a lot closer to the centers of power than the manufacturing workers were, I expect the twilight of the elites will feature even fiercer and more destructive political battles than the ones we are currently enduring — a Ragnarok of the reasoning class, if you will, an Armageddon of the academically inclined.

You have to bet that the Capital class will squash this like a bug with the help of those who wield the levers of power.

1. Flensing is the removal of blubber (fat) from the carcass of a whale prior to rendering into whale oil. The more you know!

2. Just a side note, I worked my way through college as a cook/chef. It is not a “lesser” field, it is just one that we as a society do not value enough to pay for. The absolute freak out about California setting a minimum wage for even fast-food workers is telling. The opponents believe that they have a god given right to a $5 value meal.

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