Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: the future of work.
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The Coming Jobs Collapse
AI, automation and robotics could replace nearly 100 million jobs in America over the next decade, including 40% of registered nurses, 47% of truck drivers, 64% of accountants, 65% of teaching assistants and 89% of fast food workers, among many other occupations.
So writes Senator Bernie Sanders, summarizing a Senate report released last week.
… Or Not
Other recent studies about the impact of automation on labor are more ambivalent.
The Jobs Collapse Isn’t Happening. At least, not yet. So concludes a study, released this month, conducted by the Budget Lab, a policy research center in Yale. “… our metrics indicate that the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT’s release 33 months ago … Historically, widespread technological disruption in workplaces tends to occur over decades …”
Fewer Jobs but Higher Wages, or Lower Wages but More Jobs. The optimistic upshot of a June 2025 study by MIT’s David Autor and Neil Thompson: “… automation that decreases expertise requirements reduces wages but permits the entry of less expert workers; automation that raises requirements raises wages but reduces the set of qualified workers.”
Automating Routine Tasks v. Non-Routine Tasks. Indian scholars Arvind Upreti and V. Sridhar ran simulations in December 2024: “automation of routine tasks increases wage inequality, whereas automation of non-routine tasks reduces it.”
Wages Affect Automation Innovation. So concludes this February 2025 report from the University of Zurich: “higher minimum wages for low-skill jobs drive firms to develop automation technologies. Rising wages for high-skill labor, in contrast, can hamper this effect.”
AI Can Help Recruit Blue-Collar Workers. A report from August by Dasha Shunina about an AI-driven recruitment company: “… Laborup’s core innovation: an agentic, voice-first AI that sources, interviews, verifies, and routes under-networked machinists, welders, and technicians in days, not weeks.”
According to Shunina, “As of early 2025, more than 450,000 manufacturing jobs remain unfilled, with projections that 2.1 million roles could go vacant by 2030.”
A Response from the Left
Last month, Santiago Vidal Calvo, of the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, argued that socialist Zohran Mamdani’s plan to raise New York City’s minimum wage will accelerate job loss:
… a dramatically increased wage floor would likely supercharge the adoption of automation and AI … When the cost of labor increases, machines become a reliable, cheaper alternative.
So, how should the Left think about automation?
Automation Ideology. In his 2022 book, Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work, Jason Resnikoff argues that employers have used utopian stories about automation to curb workers’ rights.
The Human Factor. Predictions about the effects of automation on labor, Chris Tilly argues in a 2022 review of Resnikoff’s book, “assume the robots are marching forward regardless of what we do, whereas in fact human actors are the ones controlling what technologies get developed, which of them are used, and how.”
Human Beings Are Still On the Hook. The real task, argues Resnikoff, lies in reconciling work and freedom. From a 2023 essay:
A misplaced faith in technological process left both unions and revolutionaries intellectually disarmed. It absolved them of the admittedly difficult task of imagining how to reconcile work and freedom. This remains the task of the Left today, which like the rest of the culture has (understandably) become increasingly dystopian. Technological dystopianism, like technological utopianism, is a kind of fetish and a distraction. It treats capital like a capitalist would — as the decisive force in history.
What Must Be Done? In his video, Sanders lays out several concrete policy proposals, including allowing workers to elect 45% of their boards of directors.
Horseshoe Theory. From a 2025 piece in the right-leaning American Compass:
agrees that automation per se is not the problem, but rather workers’ rights.
Where workers have power, the companies developing new technologies will also have a much stronger incentive to consider how a product will serve the people using it. If technology were for improving worker productivity and job quality, rather than merely for increasing profit, developers would make very different decisions about the tools and applications they created and marketed.
However, Cass breaks with the current Left on immigration.
Our Post-Work Future
Senator Sanders waxes philosophical: “Work, whether being a janitor or a brain surgeon, is an integral part of being a human being. The vast majority of people want to be productive members of society and contribute to their communities.”
If jobs become obsolete, will humans suffer?
Specific Types of Work Give Life Meaning. In After Virtue, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre describes the kinds of work that give life meaning:
… any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity … Tic-tac-toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. So are the enquiries of physics, chemistry and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music.
“What To Do When There’s Nothing To Do.” In his 2024 book, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, philosopher Nick Bostrom says that, in order to thrive in a post-work world, we need a culture that places “a premium on fun … on practices conducive to health and spiritual growth,” such as:
Building sand castles, going to the gym, reading in bed, […] playing with LEGOs, wine tasting, having a massage, learning about history, doing a silent retreat, taking drugs, getting your nails done, attending a religious ritual, keeping up with current events, interacting on social media, exploring virtual reality environments, kayaking, learning to fly a sports plane, gambling, pouring a martini, celebrating a holiday, researching your family tree, participating in a neighborhood clean-up, singing in a choir, meditating, carving pump-kins, [...] The list goes on.
“Useless Bums.” In his 2018 book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, historian Yuval Harari has predicts a shift from a “homo-centric” to a “data-centric” world, where human beings become superfluous:
… People must do something, or they go crazy. What will they do all day? One answer might be drugs and computer games.
Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual-reality worlds that would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside. Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What’s so sacred about useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences in La La Land?
First Principle. Still relevant is philosopher Frantz Fanon’s core political belief: “That the tool never possess the man.”
From the Crowd
The Crowd writes about Taylor Swift and Donald Trump.
Swifties are Not Poptimists. Critic
(read his excellent book reviews here) responds to last week’s CrowdSource about poptimism and Taylor Swift:
But Paglia likes pop culture. One of pre-conditions of poptimism is popular culture becoming the object of academic interest which allows college educated people to treat it half seriously, half ironically. And “Against Interpretation” can hardly presage poptimism. Poptimism is supported by an incessant interpretation of popular culture (in the case of music, the lyrics) that leads Swift eventually to start turning her music into a commentary on her self and career.
You Had to Be There. A cheeky response from Wisdom of Crowds contributor
:
I think Sanneh’s essay persuaded me to look into plaid-wearing indie rockers whose shows’ tickets ran to ten or twelve dollars — or maybe it just made me doubly glad that I did.
This column is consistent with Dan McAdams’ personality analysis of Trump in both his biography of Trump and his Atlantic piece from 2016. Trump lacks a narrative identity — a life story that connects his past with his present and his imagined future. From McAdams’ perspective, Trump lives in the ever-present now. His political actions are aimed at bringing all of us into that non-narrative, chaotic present NOW!
See you next week!
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I thought this was a fair critique of your critique of Smith: https://open.substack.com/pub/wisdomofcrowds/p/the-shallow-future-is-already-here?utm_source=direct&r=x0uz&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=161728002
You’re speaking past each other: Smith says, “even if art becomes mediocre because there’s less tragedy and suffering, that’s good.” You say “well, even if we have less of the suffering humanity has had in the past, we will always suffer because we are still finite”. OK, so less polio, less smallpox, less AIDS, less hunger…and still certain people will ask uncomfortable questions and make us less shallow as a result. Sounds like a win-win to me!
Could there be less *appreciation*? Less of a hierarchy to help judge what has depth and what is shallow? As always, that is up to us. We may have to build what we want if the old ways no longer work. I mean, you’re part of that process right here and now!
AI is just another step in a centuries old process called the Industrial Revolution.
How many thousands of ditch-diggers have lost their jobs to backhoes? Easily, hundreds of thousands. But it happened decades ago, and we've all forgotten about it (if we ever even thought about it).
How many stagecoach drivers lost their jobs to trains? How many bookkeepers have lost their jobs to computers? How many airline reservation clerks have lost their jobs to do-it-yourself online booking?
How many typesetters have lost their jobs? ALL of them. Nobody sets type anymore.
AI is just another step, not some revolutionary game changer. Perhaps it gets greater attention because it is affecting people who report on such things. THEY are losing their jobs this time.