 Player piano Western countries have seen a wave of blue-collar voter rebellions against the traditional political order in recent years. The pollster James Kanagasooriam looks at Britain in particular, where Brexit was driven — he argues — by a cocktail of “high migration, expanded higher education and de-industrialisation,” which lowered wages for working-class voters. They shifted toward newer, anti-Europe, anti-immigration parties to register their unhappiness with the status quo. Richer, white-collar voters voted Remain and still tend to back the main two parties, Labour and the Conservatives. That may change, says Kanagasooriam. White-collar jobs — typically knowledge and language-based — are now at greater risk than more physical blue-collar ones as a result of automation by artificial intelligence. There will soon come a time when it’s well-off college graduates who lose work or whose children can’t get a foot on the ladder. In Britain, it’s the leafy, Remain-voting, affluent areas that face the most disruption from AI: “The white-collar promise of stability and higher incomes may be imploding completely.” High housing costs, punishing marginal rates of taxation, and expensive debt are already hurting white-collar voters. “Automation may be the final straw,” says Kanagasooriam, “before white collar Britain goes into full revolt.” A stone in the shoe A few years ago, the effective altruist blogger Matthew Adelstein, aka Bentham’s Bulldog, wrote about the importance of shrimp. About 400 billion shrimp die every year for human consumption, usually in horrible conditions. Adelstein encouraged the use of electric stunners to humanely kill the shrimp, rather than allowing them to asphyxiate slowly. To his surprise, he has indirectly influenced the mainstream: The Daily Show, the huge US comedy-news program, aired a segment about shrimp welfare, apparently inspired by his blog. The episode is not entirely positive, but has pushed a once-niche topic before millions of people. The story, says Adelstein, is a lesson in the importance of “blasting good ideas into the ether.” When he wrote the original post, he assumed it would flop: “Who the heck cares about shrimp?” But it didn’t. Changing people’s minds is rarely a one-step process, he says; his own conversion to veganism came perhaps a year after watching a video making the case for it. The video “put a stone in my shoe,” he says. You never know when someone will read a thing you’ve read, and find it niggles away in the back of their mind. The aim, he says, is “not to persuade people but to give them the arguments with which they will slowly persuade themself.” Ice nice, maybe? Once, if you wanted ice, someone had to go and get it. Ice was harvested in cold places, stored, and shipped to warmer ones. But in 1851, John Gorrie, a Florida physician, patented an ice-making process, using the same evaporative cooling method that powers all modern refrigeration. He would astonish guests by serving wine with ice in the Florida summer, when ice was usually scarce. One newspaper article called him “a crank… who thinks he can make ice as good as God Almighty,” Scientific American acknowledged that it was real but doubted it would ever be commercially viable, and, as artificial ice became cheaper and more convenient, the ice industry began a backlash, pushing the advantages of “natural ice.” The parallels with the modern rise of artificial meat are obvious, says the technology writer Louis Anslow. “The notion of ‘manufacturing’ ice through an industrial process likely felt similarly strange as lab grown meat feels today,” he writes. “A product of a natural process suddenly produced through scientific wizardry.” Opponents have similarly argued that lab-grown meat is unnatural, and that it can never be cheap enough to be viable. A key difference: Natural ice producers never tried to get artificial ice banned. But several US states have already done so, bowing to powerful agricultural lobbies — including, ironically, Gorrie’s home state of Florida. |
