Class Divisions
Blue-collar was lower class, white-collar was middle class. Automation took away the blue-collar dignity. AI will take away white-collar dignity. What do you think will happen to the upper class?
I have spent the last month reading Howard Zinn's 700-page tome, “The People of the United States of America”.
I knew that the upper class in the US entered a war with the British because Britain did not want further westward expansion. At the time, the British were engaged in a war with Spain. They did not want other expenses.
George Washington and his ilk were not satisfied with the land they had appropriated and determined that the only way to continue westward was to declare independence from the British. What I did not know was, from that point in 1770 to this day, the American story is one of class struggles where the lower class has been fighting the upper class constantly for their basic rights.
The State, on the other hand, has constantly used legal violence, also known as the police, to clamp down on those who wished to extinguish these class divides.
The book does an incredible job of highlighting the oppression of the lower classes, time and again, through the use of patriotism as a tool to subdue those who saw through the system.
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution that was embraced by the Americans went a long way towards reducing the value of the worker and making them easily replaceable. When Benjamin Franklin was growing up in the American colonies, it was normal for craftspersons to go through a period of apprenticeship to learn the skill. This was almost like slavery and would last up to a decade. Franklin himself ran away from his apprenticeship.
Once you finished your apprenticeship, you became a journeyman worker. In effect, you did exactly what an apprentice did, but got paid for it. Hopefully, at some point, you became a master and set up your own shop. This ability to rise up the ranks was disrupted by the Industrial Revolution.
In the book “Blood in the Machine”, Brian Merchant gives us the history of the Luddite movement and how the people who rose against the machine were not against technology at all. They were against the specific model of industrialisation that replaced specialisation with generalisation with the specific intent to make each person replaceable.
Over the centuries, this first caused the rise of the blue-collar workers in the early 1900s. These workers required little education and were usually trained on the job to do work that was skills-oriented. During the world wars and after them, these people drove the rise of the American manufacturing machine and had respectable work. They earned decent wages and were able to afford a respectable lifestyle. The decimation of Europe enabled this in no small part.
As we put more decades between the Second World War, we find these workers’ wages stagnating.
Source: Mother Jones
A person working a blue-collar job in 1971 earned more than they do today!
On the one hand, these workers were made replaceable by mechanising most of the tasks and eliminating skills entirely, but on the other, even those jobs were sent overseas starting in the 1980s. This practice came to be known as outsourcing. Simply put, as long as you could condense a piece of work into a manual, you could send it anywhere you wished.
The decline from the late 1970s in the graph above is an indication of the demand-supply gap resulting from outsourcing.
Like that, the blue-collar workers became the poorest in the economy. They were robbed of their skills and given work that could be shipped anywhere by anyone.
New Class Rises
With the rise of the blue-collar worker, there was the rise of another type of worker - the white collar worker. There were a large number of people who were entering the workforce and working in the areas of management, and to put it broadly, knowledge work. They did not work in factories but on a table, most often with paper and pen.
Over the second half of the 20th century, this class of work became aspirational. People were told they needed to get an education, get a white-collar job and this would be the way out of poverty.
Source: Knowable Magazine
Hence, as the wages in the first graph fall, you can see the student loans rise simultaneously. They helped those who were in poverty, also fall into debt.
At the same time, not-for-profit universities saw their endowments balloon.
Source: Harvard Crimson
And the Fall
After having driven several generations into the universities, asking them to get a degree to move up socially, another threat looms. AI will again reset the class structure and the degrees of wealth concentration.
If the Industrial Revolution was about going after the poor and exploiting them. The AI revolution is about going after the middle class and exploiting them.
The only person to have appropriately described the class system of the 20th century, which is accessible to a layman, is George Carlin. He said —
"Now to balance the scale, I’d like to talk about some things that bring us together, things that point out our similarities instead of our differences cause that’s all you ever hear about in this country is our differences.
That’s all the media and the politicians are ever talking about: the things that separate us, things that make us different from one another. That’s the way the ruling class operates in any society: they try to divide the rest of the people; they keep the lower and the middle classes fighting with each other so that they, the rich, can run off with all the fucking money.
Fairly simple thing… happens to work.
You know, anything different, that’s what they’re gonna talk about: race, religion, ethnic and national background, jobs, income, education, social status, sexuality, anything they can do to keep us fighting with each other so that they can keep going to the bank.
You know how I describe the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class… keep 'em showing up at those jobs."
Source: Youtube
They are going after the middle class!
The white collar job existed because it required unique thinking and was not easily replaceable. The AI paradigm is looking to make this job replaceable as well.
The industrialists of the early 20th century made the factory jobs dumb and replaceable and embarked on greater value capture for themselves. The tech titans of the 21st century wish to make white collar jobs dumb and replaceable and embark on value capture for themselves. They call it Agentic AI.
An AI agent for customer service, for instance, could operate beyond simple question-answering. With agentic AI, it could check a user’s outstanding balance and recommend which accounts could pay it off — all while waiting for the user to make a decision so it could complete the transaction accordingly when prompted.
Agentic AI systems ingest vast amounts of data from multiple data sources and third-party applications to independently analyze challenges, develop strategies and execute tasks. Businesses are implementing agentic AI to personalize customer service, streamline software development and even facilitate patient interactions.
Source: Nvidia
So the accountant’s job - gone!
Frederick Winslow Taylor, who is described as a mechanical engineer on Wikipedia, while that is true, he was the son of a Princeton-educated lawyer who could afford to drop out of Harvard to pursue pattern making. This man, under the innocent-sounding name of ‘Time and Motion study’, created a tool to turn factory workers into automatons whose every move was to be measured.
Today, under the excuse of averting cyberattacks and improving employee workflow, employee monitoring tools track and monitor not only what the employee is doing but also their eye movements using the cameras on the computer.
Taylor reduced the blue-collar worker into a cog. The modern monitoring tools are going to do the same to white-collar workers. Not only that their every movement is being tracked to train AI.
What happens to Society
What would this do to society? You will have the poor and the slightly less poor looking up at the extravagantly rich. How do you suppose this will play out?
When the poor were a smaller subset of society, police were routinely used to put them down. What happens when that number grows? What happens when the Police are a part of that section of society?