Working Memory
A National Job Guarantee is not a make-work system for government handouts; it is money well spent on an insurance policy against the rising risk of civilizational collapse in the age of AI.
If you’ve ever driven on Route 8, just north of Pittsburgh, there is a passage into another time hiding just behind Pascale’s Pizzeria. Anyone keeping up with the pace of traffic would likely never realize that somewhere in the strip mall blur between Starbucks and Kanlaya Thai Kitchen lies an 18th-century village nestled into the hilly landscape. But if, for some reason, you happen to make a turn on South Pioneer Road, you will likely stumble upon the Depreciation Lands Museum and Park, something like a miniaturized version of Colonial Williamsburg that somehow escaped being swallowed by the homogenized suburbia surrounding it on every side. From blacksmithing to butter churning, from flax planting to wool spinning, the Depreciation Lands Museum offers tutorials on the skills and techniques that sustained the material existence of Western Pennsylvania pioneers. If you ever wanted to sit inside an 18th-century log home while still being within walking distance of a 21st-century Home Depot (assuming you don’t get hit by a car), the Depreciation Lands Museum and Park is the place for you.
The story of the Depreciation Lands is a story of currency devaluation and economic crisis. Purchased by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania from the Iroquois Confederation in 1784, the Depreciation Lands comprised 700,000 acres, territory that would become what is now northern Allegheny County, Butler County, and Beaver County. The Depreciation Lands were acquired to compensate soldiers who had served in the American Revolution. The original payment issued to the veterans of the Revolutionary War was in the form of Continental Currency, money that lost nearly all its value when rampant overprinting completely decoupled the bills from gold deposits. The doomed fate of this early American currency lives on in the phrase, “Not worth a Continental.” In place of the Continental Currency, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania issued Depreciation Certificates, giving soldiers transferrable claims on tracts of land like the parcel where the Depreciation Lands Museum is located today in Hampton Township. The Deprecation Certificates helped spark the resurgence of a frontier economy teetering on the brink of an inflation-induced economic collapse.
Anyone keeping up with recent financial news will know that, 240 years later, fears of economic collapse remain, especially since the February 22nd release of Citrini Research’s Substack piece, The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis. If there was any question about whether Substack impacts real life, the 1% decline in the S&P 500 in the wake of the Citrini piece, along with brutal losses sustained by companies ranging from IBM to MasterCard to Uber, put all doubts to rest. Substack is now a bona fide market mover.
Cleverly written as a retrospective from the year 2028, Citrini analysts James Van Geelen and Alep Shah present The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis as a thinkpiece, sketching out a scenario where the fulfillment of the most bullish predictions for AI adoption and optimization results in some of the most bearish outcomes for the overall fate of the American economy in the near term. Punctuated by headlines announcing unemployment rates of 10.2%, a 38% drop in the S&P 500, and Home Value indexes dropping by double digits in tech-centric markets like San Francisco and Austin, the Citrini piece follows two years of economic shockwaves unleashed by devastating AI disruption to industries ranging from software as a service to real estate to credit cards to private equity.
Describing the transformative effect of AI as a “feedback loop with no brake,” Van Geelen and Shah illustrate how companies’ desperate desire to keep up with AI-amplified competition compels them to slash white-collar jobs that currently represent “50% of employment” and drive roughly “75% of discretionary consumer spending.” Like a macroeconomic version of the tail-eating ouroborus snake, the ravenous mouth of AI devours the very consumers whose spending has fueled the engine of profit generation that justifies the adoption of AI in the first place. While the ouroborous of ancient and medieval mythology was a symbol of perpetual rebirth, the 21st-century AI ouroborous constricts our economy in a terminal deflationary death spiral, as AI helps companies cut production costs in a way that also slashes the disposable income of the newly unemployed and underemployed white-collar class. With less profits to be had from spending-impaired American consumers, companies will more aggressively adopt AI to cut production costs further, leading to more and more layoffs, striking higher and higher up the white-collar org chart. The cycle goes on and on with the AI ouroborous becoming all the more leaner and meaner with less and less profits available to feed the insatiable energy needs of its computational metabolism.
For AI accelerationists devoted to Silicon Valley’s cult of disruption, the Citrini piece reads as little more than a minor, temporary dystopian blip on the road to utopia. With the AI Revolution being hyped as an epic change on par with the Industrial Revolution or even the Agricultural Revolution, it is no surprise that some economic upheaval and personal financial hardship will be expected in the years to come. But this kind of nonchalant reading of the Citrini piece overlooks its most impactful rhetorical thrust: all the disruption is unleashed in a compressed two-year timeframe. In 1804, William Blake described the “dark Satanic Mills” of early industrialization, and a half-century later, Marx and Engels were still building entire theories around the perpetual immiseration of a working class that had yet to see much material benefit at all from the Industrial Revolution. Even 12,000 years after the Agricultural Revolution began in the Fertile Crescent, scientist Jared Diamond was calling the shift from hunting and gathering to farming The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. ‘
As human beings still grapple with the downsides of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolution millennia and centuries later, it is foolish to blithely dismiss the impacts of an AI Revolution that could unfold in a matter of decades or even years. In the Citrini piece, Van Gellen and Shah hint at coming social turmoil when they paint a picture of a future where “The Occupy Silicon Valley movement has been emblematic of wider dissatisfaction. Last month, demonstrators blockaded the entrances to Anthropic and OpenAI’s San Francisco offices for three weeks straight.” The standard response to dealing with social tensions exacerbated by AI-induced unemployment is to talk of Universal Basic Income or Keynes’ dream of a 15-hour work week. But more free time and a subsistence-level allowance might only fuel the fire of a violent social revolt against an AI oligarchy siphoning off increasingly larger proportions of national productivity. Alienation, disaffection, and political instability will only fester as more and more Americans have more time on their hands, yet own a smaller share of the national wealth, even if UBI keeps most from starving in the streets and sustains the flow of discretionary spending needed to keep AI companies profitable. Income transfers will also do nothing to ease the humiliation and uncertainty that builds in the hearts of humans who feel completely dependent on systems they do not understand and cannot control.
As we ponder the consequences of the Citrini scenario potentially becoming reality, what government solutions should we look to that might bring meaning to the lives of displaced American workers? Strangely, the answer to this question may not lie in the think pieces of Silicon Valley techno-optimists or UBI-loving Beltway policy wonks, but rather in the workshops of the Depreciation Lands Museum and Park. Instead of paying Americans to do nothing but ponder their growing obsolescence and fading relevance, we should be paying them to perfect and preserve the skills learned from the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions that make the AI Revolution possible, skills like metalworking and wool spinning that are taught at the Depreciation Lands Museum. As AI marches onward, we may also need to pay Americans to preserve an understanding of 20th-century skills that made computing possible in the first place. With Anthropic’s Claude gaining mastery over the antiquated COBOL language previously only mastered by a handful of IBM specialists, the very foundations of computing could be lost to human consciousness. Just as we should pay Americans to maintain the foundational skills of agriculture and industry, we should incentivize engineers to maintain the skill of writing in foundational coding languages that are already far more economically efficient to entrust to AI agents.
From animal husbandry to flax cultivation to structural welding to punchcard computing, a National Job Guarantee would not just put Americans to work, create a supply of usable goods, and boost consumer spending; it would also serve as a means to protect and preserve the foundations of human civilization if the AI Revolution goes awry. Preserving historical skills through a National Jobs Guarantee would not be a make-work bullshit jobs program for artisan, hipster LARPers. It would be an investment in safeguarding the working memory of skills that have brought human beings to our current level of technological evolution. Money paid through a National Job Guarantee to American citizens honing and preserving civilization-sustaining skills is no more of a waste than the trillions of dollars paid in insurance premiums to protect against hazards that never came to pass. A National Job Guarantee would also yield tangible fringe benefits far superior to anything offered by other forms of insurance. We only have to look at the magnificent bridges and buildings built by the Works Progress Administration or read the priceless narratives of aging freed slaves gathered by the Federal Writers Program to understand the cultural and historic value of government-funded jobs programs created during the New Deal. A bigger and bolder 21st-century National Job Guarantee Program could enlist the talents and energies of those who have been displaced and replaced by AI, putting millions to work in enriching the cultural and material life of America, while preserving the skills needed to sustain human civilization in the process.
The 2028 setting of the Citrini piece serves an important function beyond just a reminder of the rapidity of AI-induced change. The piece also reminds us that an economic program aggressively addressing the potential impacts of AI needs to be a centerpiece in the platform of any serious candidate in the 2028 Presidential race. Democratic presidential candidates peddling Biden and Obama-era economic policies for a 2028 economy that could be radically reshaped by even a partial fulfillment of the Citrini scenario should be treated as obsolete as the software jobs currently being vaporized by AI adoption. A National Job Guarantee should be the centerpiece of any economic program that strives to create a more just material reality for the American people, rather than merely rebuild the inequality-generating institutions that spawned Trumpism in the first place. The tangible, material foundations underwriting Depreciation Certificates rescued the Pennsylvania frontier economy from the empty promises of Continental Currency. In the same way, the tangible material benefits of a National Job Guarantee can rescue 2028 America from the empty promises of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and their blind faith in the saving power of an AI Revolution.