In election after election, tinier slices of ever-more-specific demographic groups in fewer battleground states determined the outcome. Finally, A.I. narrowed down the process to the perfect precision of a single person.
We Need a Universal High Income
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“Get a job!” That’s the clichéd response to panhandlers and anyone else who complains of being broke. But what if you can’t?
That dilemma is the crux of an evolving silent crisis that threatens to undermine the foundation of the American economic model.
Two-thirds of gross domestic product, most of the economy, is fueled by personal consumer spending. Most spending is sourced from personal income, overwhelmingly from salaries paid by employers. But employers will need fewer and fewer employees.
You don’t need a business degree to understand the nature of the doom loop. A smaller labor force earns a smaller national income and spends less. As demand shrinks, companies lay off many of their remaining workers, who themselves spend less, on and on until we’re all in bread lines.
Assuming there are any charities collecting enough donations to pay for the bread.
The workforce participation rate has already been shrinking for more than two decades, forcing fewer workers to pay higher taxes. It’s about to get much worse.
Workers are already being replaced by robotics, artificial intelligence and other forms of automation. Estimates vary about how many and how quickly these technologies will kill American jobs as they scale and become widely accepted, but there’s no doubt the effects will be huge and that we will see them sooner rather than later. A report by MIT and Boston University finds that two million manufacturing jobs will disappear within the coming year; Freethink sounds the death knell for 65% of retail gigs in the same startlingly short time span. A different MIT study predicts that “only 23%” of current worker wages will be replaced by automation, but it won’t happen immediately “because of the large upfront costs of AI systems.” Disruptive technologies like A.I. will create new jobs. Overall, however, McKinsey consulting group believes that 12 million Americans will be kicked off their payrolls by 2030.
“Probably none of us will have a job,” Elon Musk said earlier this year. “If you want to do a job that’s kinda like a hobby, you can do a job. But otherwise, A.I. and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want.”
For this to work, Musk observed, idled workers would have to be paid a “universal high income”—the equivalent of a full-time salary, but to stay at home. This is not to be conflated with the “universal basic income” touted by people like Andrew Yang, which is a nominal annual government subsidy, not enough to pay all your expenses.
“It will be an age of abundance,” Musk predicts.
The history of technological progress suggests otherwise. From the construction of bridges across the Thames during the late 18th and early 19th centuries that sidelined London’s wherry men who ferried passengers and goods, to the deindustrialization of the Midwest that has left the heartland of the United States with boarded-up houses and an epic opioid crisis, to Uber and Lyft’s solution to a non-existent problem that now has yellow-taxi drivers committing suicide, ruling-class political and business elites rarely worry about the people who lose their livelihoods to “creative destruction.”
Whether you’re a 55-year-old wherry man or cabbie or accountant who loses your job through no fault of your own other than having the bad luck to be born at a time of dramatic change in the workplace, you always get the same advice. Pay to retrain in another field—hopefully you have savings to pay for it, hopefully your new profession doesn’t become obsolete too! “Embrace a growth mindset.” Whatever that means. Use new tech to help you with your current occupation—until your boss figures out what you’re up to and decides to make do with just the machine.
Look at it from their—the boss’s—perspective. Costs are down, profits are up. They don’t know you, they don’t care about you, guilt isn’t a thing for them. What’s not to like about the robotics revolution?
Those profits, however, belong to us at least as much as they do to “them”—employers, bosses, stockholders. Artificial intelligence and robots are not magic; they were not conjured up from thin air. These technologies were created and developed by human beings on the backs of hundreds of millions of American workers in legacy and now-moribund industries. If the wealthy winners of this latest tech revolution are too short-sighted and cruel to share the abundance with their fellow citizens—if for no better reason than to save their skins from a future violent uprising and their portfolios from disaster when our consumerism-based economy comes crashing down—we should force them to do so.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
Ready Or Not
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Despite considerable evidence that artificial intelligence is far from ready for prime time, just about every technology you can think of is being outfitted with the feature. From search engines to automobiles, we’re putting our lives into the “hands” of A.I. that advises us, literally, to eat rocks.
DMZ America Podcast #148: Israel the Pariah, Alito’s False Flags, Artificial Journalism
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It’s the DMZ America podcast, where political cartoonists bring their smart takes on the news to spirited, intelligent, civilized dialogue from both sides of the political aisle. Ted Rall (WhoWhatWhy, Creators Syndicate) comes from the Left, Scott Stantis (Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News) comes from the Right and sparks fly.
First up: the guys react to the increasing diplomatic isolation of Israel, marked by the decision of the International Court of Justice to order Israel to stand down in the Gaza Strip, following on the heels of the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue a warrant for the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Scott, a supporter of Israel, debates Israel’s intentions and war aims with Ted, a supporter of Palestinian emancipation.
Second: Scott’s expertise as a vexologist comes into play in light of Supreme Court Samuel Alito’s decision to fly flags associated with the extreme Right at his homes. How much should we make of Alito’s flag choices? Scott argues: a lot. Should he recuse himself from Trump’s Jan. 6th case?
Third: The Washington Post tries to solve its budgetary difficulties by putting A.I. “everywhere in the newsroom,” whatever that means. Considering that Google AI is a total disaster, this might need to be rethunk. Too bad a rich guy like Jeff Bezos can’t afford to save the paper.
Watch the Video Version: here.
(Video will be live approximately 6:30 Eastern Daylight time May 24th)
Deep Fake A.I. Ads Might Kill Us All
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Seeing is believing. In the age of AI, it shouldn’t be.
In June, for example, Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign issued a YouTube ad that used generative artificial-intelligence technology to produce a deep-fake image of former President Donald Trump hugging appearing to hug Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former COVID-19 czar despised by anti-vax and anti-lockdown Republican voters. Video of Elizabeth Warren has been manipulated to make her look as though she was calling for Republicans to be banned from voting. She wasn’t. As early as 2019, a Malaysian cabinet minister was targeted by a AI-generated video clip that falsely but convincingly portrayed him as confessing to having appeared in a gay sex video.
Ramping up in earnest with the 2024 presidential campaign, this kind of chicanery is going to start happening a lot. And away we go: “The Republican National Committee in April released an entirely AI-generated ad meant to show the future of the United States if President Joe Biden is re-elected. It employed fake but realistic, photos showing boarded up storefronts, armored military patrols in the streets, and waves of immigrants creating panic,” PBS reported.
“Boy, will this be dangerous in elections going forward,” former Obama staffer Tommy Vietor told Vanity Fair.
Like the American Association of Political Consultants, I’ve seen this coming. My 2022 graphic novel The Stringer depicts how deep-fake videos and other falsified online content of political leaders might even cause World War III. Think that’s an overblown fear? Think again. Remember how residents of Hawaii jumped out of their cars and jumped down manholes after state authorities mistakenly issued a phone alert of an impending missile strike? Imagine how foreign officials might respond to a high-quality deep-fake video of, for example, President Joe Biden declaring war on North Korea or of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seeming to announce an attack against Iran. What would you do if you were a top official in the DPRK or Iranian governments? How would you determine whether the threat were real?
Here in the U.S., generative-AI-created political content could will stoke racial, religious and partisan hatred that could lead to violence, not to mention interfering with elections.
Private industry and government regulators understand the danger. So far, however, proposed safeguards fall way short of what would be needed to ensure that the vast majority of political content is what it seems to be.
The Federal Election Committee has barely begun to consider the issue. The real action so far, such as it is, has been on the Silicon Valley front. “Starting in November, Google will mandate all political advertisements label the use of artificial intelligence tools and synthetic content in their videos, images and audio,” Politico reports. “Google’s latest rule update—which also applies to YouTube video ads—requires all verified advertisers to prominently disclose whether their ads contain ‘synthetic content that inauthentically depicts real or realistic-looking people or events.’ The company mandates the disclosure be clear and conspicuous’ on the video, image or audio content. Such disclosure language could be ‘this video content was synthetically generated,’ or ‘this audio was computer generated,’ the company said.”
Labeling will be useless and ineffective. Synthetic content that deep-fakes the appearance of a politician or a group of people doing, or saying something that they actually never did or said sticks in people’s minds even after they’ve been informed that it’s wrong—especially when the material confirms or fits with viewers’ pre-existing assumptions and world views.
The only solution is to make sure they are never seen at all. AI-generated deep fakes of political content should be banned online, whether with or without a warning label.
The culprit is the “illusory truth effect” of basic human psychology: once you have seen something, you can’t unsee it—especially if it’s repeated. Even after you are told that something you’ve seen was fake and to disregard it, it continues to influence you as if you still took it at face value. Trial lawyers are well aware of this phenomenon, which is why they knowingly make arguments and allegations that are bound to be ordered stricken by a judge from the court record; jurors have heard it, they assume there’s at least some truth to it, and it affects their deliberations.
We’ve seen how pernicious misinformation like the Russiagate hoax and Bush’s lie that Saddam was aligned with Al Qaeda can be—over a million people dead—and how such falsehoods retain currency long after they’ve been debunked. Typical efforts to correct the record, like “fact-checking” news sites, are ineffective and sometimes even serve to reinforce the falsehood they’re attempting to correct or undermine. And those examples are ideas expressed through mere words.
Real or fake, a picture speaks more loudly than a thousand words. False visuals are even more powerful than falsehoods expressed through prose. Even though there is no contemporaneous evidence that any Vietnam War veteran was ever accosted by antiwar protesters who spit on them, many Vietnam vets began to say it had happened to them—after they viewed Sylvester Stallone’s monologue in the movie “Rambo: First Blood,” which was likely intended as a metaphor. Yet, throughout the late 1970s, no vet ever made such a claim, even in personal correspondence. They probably even believe it; they “remember” what never occurred.
Warning labels can’t reverse the powerful illusory truth effect. Moreover, there is nothing to stop someone from reproducing and distributing a properly-warning-labeled deep-fake AI-generated campaign attack ad, stripped of any indication that the content isn’t what it seems.
AI is here to stay. So are bad actors and scammers. Particularly in the political space, First Amendment-guaranteed free speech must be protected. But thoughtful government regulation of AI, with strong enforcement mechanisms including meaningful penalties, will be essential if we want to avoid chaos and worse.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
