Average Is Over: Why AI Won’t Upend the Social Order

Taleb is back with another round of “AI cope:” Two weeks ago I wrote that predictions of widespread AI job loss often amount to a coping mechanism. His tweets can be interpreted in two ways: as what he thinks will happen, but also as what he wants to happen. A lot of people want to see an AI crisis, a bubble, or the obsolescence of white-collar jobs (including math and high-status academic jobs) in order to reconcile themselves to their own mediocrity. The cognitive dissonance is especially telling. Many of these people hold both beliefs at once or alternate between them depending on their mood or the news cycle: that the AI buildout is a bubble that is unsustainable and will pull the US economy into crisis, and/or that AI will lead to mass joblessness, necessitating a UBI and/or bringing about societal upheaval (whew, that was a lot to say). You cannot have it both ways: AI cannot be both vaporware and economically consequential. AI cannot be so productivity-enhancing that it creates…