AI is an attack from above on wages": cognitive scientist Hagen Blix

Summary

Greetings all, Hope everyone’s hanging in, hammers at the ready. So, I know I promised a podcast in the last newsletter, but, well, I blew it on the recording. I am not, I regret to inform you, an audio engineer, and the sound quality just wasn’t there. However! The conversation, with the New York-based cognitive scientist and author Hagen Blix, was so good and timely that I was moved to LABORIOUSLY transcribe our chat, largely BY HAND, edit it, and present the finished product here as a Q+A instead. Blix has a book out with coauthor Ingeborg Glimmer, called Why We Fear AI, which argues, convincingly, that… well I won’t give it away quite yet because that’s basically my first question. But suffice it to say that I’d been meaning to chat with Blix for months now—things have just been so, well, you know. But he makes a number of compelling arguments about the nature of AI, why not just workers but bosses are afraid of it, and why we shouldn’t see it as a productivity tool but a wage depression tool. It’s all good stuff, and I’d heartily recommend anyone pick up the book and give it a read; it’s nice and short to boot. As always, work like this—research and interviews and the editing and transcribing thereof—is only made possible by my glorious paid supporters, who chip in a few bucks a month, or $60 a year, so I can keep the blood in the machine pumping. If you value this stuff, please consider doing the same, so I can continue to publish great discussions like this one, with folks like Hagen, and keep the vast majority of this site paywall free. Many thanks to those kindred ludds who already do chip in, you are the greatest. Okay, thanks everyone, and onward.The cover of Why We Fear AI, by Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer. Common Notions press.BLOOD IN THE MACHINEThe book is called “Why we fear AI.” So why do we fear AI?HagenThe book grew partly out of Ingeborg and me talking about all these crazy narratives around like, “oh, AI is going to destroy the world. AI is go...