Other conservatives often assume that automation will always eliminate jobs that give workers a sense of meaning. As the story goes, the blue-collar embodied work that made red America was automated or shipped overseas, and what replaced it was soul-destroying office jobs. Looking at the past twenty years, there’s good reason to believe this story. Manufacturing has indeed declined. Office work has indeed exploded. There is a vitality of physical work that is missing, with some scrambling to replace it with weightlifting and supplements.
Extend the history lesson to 100, 200, or 2000 years. Does this story still hold? I would argue that it doesn’t. The factory jobs some conservatives miss were themselves the product of new technologies. They replaced some of the most unhealthy, self-destructive work in American history, such as deadly, poorly paid mining jobs. The 1950s, single-income family doesn’t just disappear if you look 30 years later, but also if you look 30 years prior. It was in large part enabled by new technologies: efficient construction of new homes, widespread adoption of cars enabling life in the suburbs, and the modern manufacturing systems which those factory jobs depended on. The same is true across centuries and decades. Hobbes rightly described life as “nasty, brutish and short”. Technology eliminated jobs as deadly as warzones in favor of the American life conservatives now reminisce over.
I believe artificial intelligence will follow this broader historical trend; the last 20 years of automation was a historical anomaly. For example, large language models such as ChatGPT are best at filling repetitive, routine paperwork. It takes away work that no one wants to do — tax filings, HR compliance, call centers, and other soulless corporate busywork. In the same way that technology brought about the work many conservatives recall fondly, the current wave of technology directly targets the work those same people excoriate. I would urge all conservatives not to let the post 1950s story get in the way of a future that is not only more prosperous, but more human.