the election after this one

A day into this month, Intel has announced layoffs of 15,000 employees. Bungie is the latest game developer to go through a round of firings, bringing the year's total of game developers fired to well over 10,000.

If you have been to a fast food restaurant recently, you might have noticed a kiosk doing a job a human used to manage. Food service is getting off lucky though. Only 12% of the workforce is in danger of getting replaced. According to Visual Capitalist, that threat is between 19% to 46% for most industries.

I support AI and automation, but I can see that these productivity gains will be concentrated in a few hands. So many are going to be left behind.

It's a little strange that elections still aren't focused on this issue. Is it just that Andrew Yang was ahead of his time?

It might be that the opposition wasn't coherent yet. You can point to the vast debt the US is in as a counter to universal basic income, but for now, the two major parties have agreed to ignore the debt to avoid touching social security.

However, if the question is altered a bit, we aren't talking about UBI anymore, but AI. And views on AI divide society, but not along the clean partisan lines that we are used to with other issues. Democrats are more positive on AI, and more likely to support regulation. Republicans are the inverse. But it is easy to imagine a new political paradigm, where a faction that wants to lean into AI while tempering the effects with UBI opposes a group that wants to hit the brakes on everything.

For close to eight years now, politics has been too obsessed with culture war antics to really focus on a particular issue. Between a left-wing ideology that takes up a lot of mental real estate and right-wing support for some guy that devours the rest, we could only consider the handful of issues that fed the rancor.

At some point, Trump will exit the public stage. I don't even want to speculate how; his fans are out of their minds. But it will happen. Wokeness will be around longer in some form, but through a process of dialogue and persuasion, I imagine that society will slowly extract the more useful ideas and discard the rest.

I know that the current culture war seems intractable. But the future is coming fast.