In keeping with the Homer revival that Christopher Nolan has bestowed on us, I’ll begin this short discussion of AI and its associated anxieties with some lines from the Iliad in which Hephaistos, the god who worked as a blacksmith, is “working on 20 tripods … that of their own motion they could wheel into” Olympus.
“As if,” Aristotle, quoting the line, wrote in The Politics, “a shuttle could weave of itself.”
Today, Bronze Age magic is coming to the data center down the block (well, rising where the block once stood). And to the factory where robots do what was until recently the work of humans.
The robot revolution took a particularly graphic turn last week when the front page of The New York Times business section featured a large photo of a humanoid robot hauling a cart and posted a video of it online. The photo/video was taken at a BMW plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and the fact that the robot was colored black brought up all kinds of associations that BMW and South Carolina certainly didn’t want brought up. South Carolina was the state in the antebellum South where Black people—nearly every one of them enslaved—outnumbered whites, where the slaves, therefore, did almost all the work, and thus almost all the work went unpaid, which is one reason why the state was the most emphatic proponent of savagely racist slavery and the first to secede after Abraham Lincoln’s election.
Looking at the photo and the video, the thought that inescapably came to mind was that, but for the years between 1865 and 2026, the state has gone from slave labor to bot labor, with a 161-year interregnum in which its employers of manual laborers were compelled, alas, to pay human beings for their work. Obviously, the horrors that the owners routinely inflicted on their slaves are in no way replicated in their treatment of bots, but the drive to reap profits undiminished by wages is a through-line nonetheless.
South Carolina has done its damnedest to pay as little as possible.
Though forced at Union Army gunpoint, and then by the 13th Amendment, to pay its workers, South Carolina has done its damnedest to pay as little as possible, being one of just five states (the others are Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee) never to have enacted a minimum wage law of its own, and enforcing its “right-to-work” law so assiduously that it ranked 48th among the states last year in the share of its workers who were union members (2.7 percent). In consequence, virtually none of the workers with factory jobs in South Carolina, beginning with those in the BMW plant where bots now bustle, have a union that could negotiate some arrangement in which they’re trained for supervisory positions or paid an adequate settlement for being replaced.
Not surprisingly, the coming of AI has become a major political issue. As the Washington Post reported last week, nearly 40 percent of this year’s political campaigns feature websites in which a candidate stakes out a position on AI and/or data centers. The arrival of data centers has upset voters across the political spectrum, since they’re usually accompanied by higher electric bills, the occasional brown-out or water issues, and wholesale neighborhood transformation.
What’s more, the replacement of humans engaged in both manual and mental labor is now both a reality and a specter that stalks all manner of people either in or would-otherwise-be-in the labor market. In that latter category we disproportionately find men who look at a labor market mainly featuring jobs in health care and education and can’t find a plausible place for themselves. Outside those two sectors, we’re already experiencing what Greg Ip, The Wall Street Journal’s chief economics commentator, has termed “a jobless boom,” in which adopting AI is increasing the profits of the vast majority of the companies on the S&P 500 (and not just the tech giants, but also the non-tech companies that are adopting AI), even as they curtail hiring.
For those Americans who pay attention to such matters, the coming of a jobless boom only heightens their skepticism and animosity toward actually existing American capitalism. (Commentators who marvel at the burgeoning number of American socialists might pause to consider that.) That animosity is compounded by the fact that the jobless part of the boom is engineered by the relatively small number of owners and investors who experience the boom part, and by the fact that the tech oligarchs who are the boom’s greatest beneficiaries have gone out of their way to broadcast their indifference to those harmed by job disappearance or data center arrival, their conspicuous consumption, and their purchase of elections and government officials.
If Democrats can’t make political hay by running against Trump and his leading funders they should find another line of work.
The most prominent of these—Musk, Zuckerberg, Andreessen, the Ellisons—have also worked concertedly to boost the political and economic fortunes of Donald Trump, who shares their enthusiasm for AI and the data centers and pays heed only to the boom while either oblivious or indifferent to its jobless part. (That’s surely something that Natalie Harp, whose job is to hover around Trump to share with him every tidbit of news or social media post that might be construed as pro-Trump, doesn’t call to his attention.)
The Post story on the races where data centers and AI have become a candidate focus makes clear that the clear majority of the candidates raising these issues are Democrats. As well they should be. If Democrats can’t make political hay by running against Trump and his leading funders—the authors of our jobless boom and the purchasers of public policy—they should find another line of work.
Finally, a closing thought about South Carolina, where workers are denied the voice and power that would come with unionization to work some kind of at least marginally beneficial arrangement, as unionized longshore workers did when machines take their jobs.
Every South Carolinian who loses his or her job to a robot should be tallied in the next census as 3/5 of a person, though only for purposes of reducing the state’s congressional representation. For a state that made its mark as the pre-eminent champion a system of barbaric, racist unpaid human labor, it would be only fitting that its current embrace of unmitigated and un-negotiated job loss to robots, and the accompanying profit increase at the expense of wages, come complete with a comparable 40 percent reduction in House members. If South Carolina wants to move to a robotized version of its unpaid-labor past, some penalty should damn well be attached.
