The jobs remaining

There's a lot of concern about all the destruction of labor demand produced by the expansion of AI. Kai Fu Lee, in his very solid book AI Superpowers, which chronicles and meditates on what AI can do and how its growth has expanded, concludes the book with an anecdote about some nice old guy in a golf cart volunteering to help out at a conference or a tourist site or something. Which was lovely. I think his overall point was that there will always be a need for service and human kindness.

This week in the Journal's Review section an article about "What AI Still Doesn't Know How to Do" was across the fold from a long story about how the US and the West were behind Russia and China in a race to court the Global South: Africa and Latin America. I didn't bother to read the article about AI, but I read the one about the Global South with great interest.

AI can't do shit about big issues like that, nor can it help us with the great splitting of our society into rabidly opposed Left and Right, our culture wars, our wealth disparity, our mental health problems... There are a great many problems we have that are in the public sphere and must be resolved not just through policy, but through leadership, through bringing society together on a notion of what is a right path. We cannot expect just to grow the government and fix it that way, that ain't happening. But the problems are public in nature and the jobs to fix them will not be highly remunerative, for the most part. Too many of our best and brightest are drawn immediately into whatever promises the most money. For decades it was Wall Street. Now it is tech. This has led us down a rabbit hole.

For both our international issues and our domestic ones, we need people who will both serve in elected offices but also -- and this is crucial -- people who will work in the public domain in salaried, non-political roles that accrue knowledge and wisdom across political administrations. The Deep State is -- if not our only hope -- a big one.