In "The True Believer," Eric Hoffer wrote, "Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status."
We're about to find out just how right he was.
From the 1970s to roughly now, offshoring and automation gobbled up blue-collar factory-type jobs.
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This went on for decades in industry after industry, with everything from textiles to semiconductor manufacturing closing or moving offshore.
White-collar types were notably unsympathetic, for the most part.
Berkeley professor and Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich declared the future belonged to the "symbolic analysts" -- people who, in the words of a Steve Earle song, use their brains and not their hands.
Laid-off coal miners in the last decade were contemptuously told to "learn to code."
But the worm has turned. Google is looking at laying off 30,000 people it expects to replace with artificial intelligence.
The Wall Street Journal reports that large corporations across the board are planning to lay off white-collar workers.
Investor Brian Wang notes ChatGPT is already causing white-collar job loss.
In fact, ChatGPT can even code.
Sometimes its code is quite good. Sometimes it's not so good.
(Though God knows, the latter is true of much human-generated software code too.)
It can write press releases, ad copy, catalog descriptions, news stories and essays, speeches, encyclopedia entries, customer-inquiry responses and more.
It can generate art on demand that's suitable for book covers, advertisements and magazine illustrations.
Again, sometimes these items are quite good, and sometimes they're not, but there's a lot of less-than-stellar human work in those categories too.
Learning to code is bad advice now.
And the kicker is, AI is getting better all the time.
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People losing their jobs to AI is just the tip of the iceberg.
In the next decade, lots more people -- possibly (gulp) including professors like me -- will be facing potential replacement by machines.
It turns out that using your brain and not your hands isn't as good a move as it may have once seemed.
People who work with their hands have some advantages.
If you want something done in the material world, you still need people.
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Unlike blue-collar workers, who got little sympathy, these laid off white-collar workers will have more clout.
Expect them to create much more of a stink than those laid-off steelworkers managed to back in 1977.
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