The Mystery of the Missing AI Issue

The election of 2024 somehow managed to miss it altogether, where did it go?

What was the biggest issue no one brought up during the 2024 Presidential Election? It was AI. While both sides provided lip service as to the economic importance of developing AI, no one mentioned the associated economic risks. Thus, going into 2025, the United States has no plans whatsoever to deal with (or to even discuss) what will likely be a major restructuring of the US workforce that will be almost entirely due to greater adoption of AI tech. In fact, this restructuring is already underway. It's important for us to be cognizant that successful adoption of AI also necessarily has to include the ability to absorb it with the least amount of disruption possible. That requires both a dialog and deliberate risk mitigation - neither of which is happening. AI Thought of the Day (Dec 13th)

In a year of extreme strangeness, the seemingly remarkable disappearance of Artificial Intelligence in our national political dialog during the 2024 election marks an especially striking note. Neither party had an AI platform plank - or perhaps they both had the same one, here are some quotes…

"We are going to be working together, investing in America's competitiveness and future," Harris added after she underscored the need toward stimulating innovative technologies. "Our goal: promote innovative technologies, including AI and digital assets, and simultaneously protect our consumers and investors." VP Harris

and

In a Truth Social post, Trump said that Sacks “will focus on making America the clear global leader in both areas. He will safeguard Free Speech online, and steer us away from Big Tech bias and censorship.” quote regarding Trump’s selection of David Sacks as the administration AI Czar today.

While there have been slight differences in spin regarding regulation, the gist of both parties approach has been a more or less full speed ahead approach with limited restrictions / regulation and limited discussion of job displacements resulting from AI adoption. Part of the problem of course, is that we currently have no systematic way to even track that this job loss is occurring - here’s an article from late last year: In this and other articles companies are only self-reporting that mere handfuls of jobs are being lost specifically to AI, yet at the same time - suspiciously - there has been a significant trend of job losses in Silicon Valley (and among the wider tech community) attributed variously to efficiency and / or the need to redirect capital towards AI investments (which apparently doesn’t count when tabulating AI-related job losses). What’s more, many of these losses are occurring at companies showing profits.

The tech sector is not the only place being impacted by the widespread introduction of AI automation. Again though, it’s going to be very difficult to tease out numbers that can directly correlate job losses to introduction of technologies, and this is partly due to the fact that these types of automation-focused job replacements were happening for years (or decades) before the introduction of AI.

So, what’s different now about AI? In two words; the pace and the scale. It has the potential to displace millions of jobs and at the same time, unlike many of the previous IT-driven shifts in the workplace, this time it’s not clear that new job types are being created to balance the loss of older ones. Ignoring this very real possibility and the fact that little to no mitigation is even being discussed is quite troubling and again represented the most perplexing part of the last election. While many decried the impacts of undocumented workers, there seemed to be no concern at all for what may represent a large chunk of the best-paying jobs currently held by American workers. The entire sum of what we now consider to White Collar jobs is now at risk. This presents perhaps our first real challenge associated with widespread adoption of AI technology. If we truly believe that AI can improve our society (and we continue to make it ever more capable) we also have to acknowledge the risks up front and consider how to soften the potential negative impacts. Contrary to the constant and silly proclamations by leaders in the AI industry, the risks that we need to address are not the introduction of Skynet and the The Singularity in 10 or 20 years, the risks are economic disruptions beginning right now.

copyright 2024, Stephen Lahanas