THREAD: In the last 24 hours I ended up having to deliver impromptu primers on AI, automation, and the future of work to a heavily tattooed, formerly pro-Trump biker, a physiologist, and a construction worker who also drove rideshares. These are no longer academic, niche topics.
Aside from rabidly pro-Trump retirees and cult of personality devotees full of bile and fury, everyone who isn't already benefitting from the creative destruction accelerated by modern technology wants to know their place in a new world they're seeing being built around them.
They know it's impossible to fight the march of time and they want to better understand AI and robotics, how they can leverage those new technologies to keep their jobs and find new ones, and how to teach their kids to do the same instead of pretending they can stop the future.
I tried to give them solutions based on working with the very technologies worrying them and spelled out what policies could help them adapt and eventually thrive instead of giving them vague platitudes, and they walked away feeling better about what's coming around the horizon.
So the lesson here, is that if you're a politician and your campaign advisers aren't grilling you on education policy, making you watch primers on AI and automation, and pitching platforms that will rapidly divert more people into the trades, creative arts, and STEM, fire them.
And don't just fire them, fire them so hard there will be smoking skidmarks where their asses hit the ground on their way out. If you don't understand these topics when running for public office, you will be serving at the whim of angry conspiracy theorists and partisan zealots.
You will get nothing useful done, you will have to resort to divisive partisanship to hold your office, and every election night, you'll have to pray that your voters haven't gotten sick of your empty promises and vapid platitudes while they watch their communities suffer.
In short, brush up on that nerd shit because it already mattered six years ago, and having a firm command of it today is a matter of economic life or death for millions of workers and voters tomorrow. As in literally, the day after this one.
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