AI, Jobs, and a Widow Named Sal
“My basic model of the next decade is that the marginal cost of intelligence … [is] going to trend rapidly towards zero.” — Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
“The peasants are starving? Why, let them eat cake!” — Unknown, but often attributed to Marie Antoinette
Ken Follett’s excellent “Pillars of the Earth” series tracks the development of the fictional town of Kingsbridge, England. The five book series revolves around the challenges of working class people dealing with the church, the aristocracy, and the “masters” who control both wealth and government.
The latest installment of the Kingsbridge series is, ironically, germane to AI.
Set in 1792, The Armor of Light sees England lurching into both democracy and the industrial revolution. Parliament is firmly controlled by the monied interests while the underclass scrapes by with negligible rights. The established economic order is a layered series of manual jobs in which shillings start at the top with people who can afford clothes and trickle down to the most menial job: spinning wool into thread. Thread is spun by women who work in their homes for 12 hours per day to put the most basic staples on the family table.
It is here that we meet Sal, a widow who provides for her young son, Kit, by spinning the thread for a local fabric maker. But the old economy is being torn asunder by innovation. Using a new machine, a single woman can perform the work of 10 manual spinners. Labor is being pulled from homes into workshops. Many jobs are being displaced while others are being created. The machines need tending and they learn that children’s small hands are excellent for fixing things. Kit is particularly good at this and has a knack for quickly understanding machinery. For Sal’s friend Jarge, however, the decline in manual labor is a tragedy that erodes his place in the town, leading him to drinking, vandalism and violence.
The whole story is complicated by greed, politics, and … inevitability.
Lots of thinking is happening on how the AI revolution will impact jobs. Against the looming fear of broad job displacement sits centuries of history that tell us disruptive technologies ultimately increase societal productivity and produce better jobs. That history is cold comfort to a 21st century Sal who is worrying that her call center job will be taken by a GenAI bot that speaks 120 languages and never sleeps. It’s all well-and-good to say that things will be alright so long as you’re not the one who suddenly lost her livelihood and means of providing for her family.
Of course, 18th century Sal would leap at the chance to swap places with her modern day counterpart. When our contemporary Sal worries about AI, she almost certainly does so from a heated home, having shopped at a grocery store with thousands of items, and will share her concerns via a smartphone that brings the world to her fingertips. 21st Century Sal has these things because science and innovation prevailed. Creative destruction pulled much of society off of farms, into and then out of sweatshops, into and then out of coal mines, and into and then (quite recently) back out of cubicles. Along the way the world was re-invented many times over bringing un-imagined quality-of-life advances.
That truth, however, does not take away the legitimate claims and concerns of either 18th or 21st century Sal. Her family needs food, shelter, and healthcare now. Not in 20 years.
If Altman is correct, professionals who have long considered themselves the progenitors of change, rather than its victims, may suddenly find themselves on the other side of the stick. Generative and then Agentic AI will allow corporations of all sizes to reduce or eliminate customer service, programming, finance, sales, marketing and other high paying, white collar positions. Altman is talking up his own wares, but anyone using Generative AI cannot help but think he may be right.
18th-century Sal’s chief demand was that the company owners didn’t simply inflict the new machines on the workers and society, but rather engaged the workers to determine how best to incorporate the technology into the companies. She was not blind to the need for change and saw the merits of innovation. In particular, she saw that Kit could have a much better life building machines rather than engaging in the brutal, manual labor jobs of the existing system. Sal herself became an important agent of change … and her vehicle was unionization.
It is easy to overlook the revolutions in workers rights that accompanied past technical disruptions. Born out of danger and abuse, the union was a modern miracle centuries in the making. In many ways, what sprouted in the Magna Carta found its endpoint with the creation of unions: a legally sanctioned check on the ability of the powerful to mistreat the powerless.
Society cannot simply tell Sal and her friends to eat cake. The job displacement caused by AI may be savage if it is not managed properly. Some are calling for the imposition of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as the response to AI job disruption. Mollifying the AI-unemployed with UBI fails to address fundamental human and economic needs. Rather than lifting people up, it seems more likely to encourage idleness and embitterment. Society must do better.
There is much to dislike about modern unions, but as the AI revolution unfolds unions’ role will be of growing rather than waning importance to legions of 21st century Sals. Our labor leaders must work with government, big tech and other companies to demand and then support a high quality, empathetic transition to an AI world. Union leaders would do well to embrace the wisdom of 18th century Sal to help bridge the gap between workers and business owners rather than attempting to sabotage inevitable technical progress.
