Everyone has something to say about AI lately, and very often these hot takes reveal less about how we can address the latest technological developments, and more about the general point of view of the person offering the take. Such is the case with the latest from economist Adam Ozimek, who explains that it’s “incoherent” for anyone to think that AI could cause mass joblessness, because if AI was able to do any such thing, that same AI “would have the ability to mitigate the social problems that would come with mass joblessness.” From Ozimek’s point of view, “There is no world where AI replaces us all at work but can't help us reach our highest best selves.”

This line of thinking says less about our AI future than it does about how orthodox economic thinkers continue to fail to consider the role of power. Because the same statement could be made in the abstract about any technological change. Surely the invention of the cotton gin could make plantations so much more productive that owners would no longer enslave workers… but that’s not what happened in the pre-Civil War South. Surely the increased efficiency that comes from industrial automation could produce enough surplus to address job displacement…. but that’s not what was experienced by hundreds of thousands of American factory workers. Surely global free trade could knit people together across the world… but instead income inequality has increased and immigration restrictions have grown. Things that are technically possible don’t simply happen because they would be nice — power is central in determining how technology is deployed. That seems pretty obvious, but somehow you can still get treated as being a naturally intelligent economist without ever acknowledging that basic underlying reality of life on our planet.

Make it make sense.

When people call for increasing the retirement age, one of the easy arguments that always gets offered is that life expectancy has increased, so it’s only fair to give a few of those additional years to your job instead of oh, say, enjoying them. And while that’s hardly a convincing argument, it seems intuitively true that all the advances in medical care over the past few decades must mean we’re all living longer lives.

But as the chart below shows, there’s a stark divergence in life expectancy trends for adults with four-year college degrees, as compared to adults without such degrees. In fact, since 1992, life expectancies for those without degrees has declined slightly. Additionally, those without degrees are also more likely to work in more physical jobs that are more difficult to do in older age. So what’s the argument again for forcing people to work longer before they can retire?

For all the AI speculation and self-promotion by economists, investors, professional opinion-havers, and basically everyone else, it can be hard to find any actual information about how and where AI is actually being deployed. So when an actual living example shows up that’s not just a technology demo, it’s instructive to dig in — and there’s a lot to consider from this reporting on how fast food chains are beginning to deploy AI. And no, they’re not using the technology to ease physical and mental burdens on workers, to lower costs by minimizing food waste, to "help us reach our highest best selves" or to do anything else that sounds even vaguely helpful to the world.

Instead, some fast food outlets are using an AI-enhanced surveillance system to track and digest streams of audio and video data to evaluate which individual employees are most successfully “upselling” customers. Supersizing surveillance of minimum wage workers: that’s the piece of the AI future that seems to be actually arriving. Maybe that whole “robotic overlords” thing isn’t all that funny after all?

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