AI propaganda strikes again

Reactionary nostalgia collides with Silicon Valley's bogus hype machine

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In my last post, you’ll recall that I recounted a 2018 exchange between Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson in which the latter argued for a blanket ban on self-driving trucks. More notable, though, was how Carlson justified his case. Here’s their exchange again for conveniences’ sake:

Shapiro: You talk in [your] book about technology and how it’s shifting and taking away jobs from folks, and you make specific reference to truck driving and the fact that there are going to be these automated cars on the roads. So would you, Tucker Carlson, be in favour of restrictions on the ability of trucking companies to use this sort of technology specifically to, sort of, artificially maintain the number of jobs that are available in the trucking industry?

Carlson: Are you joking? In a second. In a second. In other words, if I were president, would I say to the Department of Transportation, “We’re not letting driverless trucks on the road, period”? Why? Really simple. Driving for a living is the single most common job for high school–educated men in this country.

The piece wasn’t specifically about the trucking question. But after I published it I received a rather interesting note from Cory Doctorow that merits a friendly addendum. If you’re unfamiliar with Cory’s work, he’s doing some of the finest writing in the field of AI and his recent book Enshittification is the best intervention I’ve personally encountered on the question of why so many online platforms have become totally unusable. In any case, there’s a section in his forthcoming The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI that deals directly with the trucking issue and what it contains is very interesting.

In his reply to Shapiro, it turns out, Tucker Carlson was in fact regurgitating a rather flimsy talking point being circulated by AI’s corporate boosters. I won’t quote directly from the book since it isn’t out yet, but the essence of what Doctorow alerted me to is this: in their quest to hype up AI technology, the tech lobby started circulating the narrative that truckers — who performed the most popular job in all of America — were about to be made redundant en masse.

The rub was that both pillars of this claim were actually inaccurate. I won’t bore you too much here, but basically there was a transparently bogus inflation of Bureau of Labour Statistics figures regarding how many people are paid to drive trucks. What Carlson was invoking in the service of his point was a male-coded image of big rigs spluttering plumes of black smoke from their phallic-shaped exhaust stacks — said rigs being driven by burly guys who never went to college. The thing is, the BLS counts a lot of other workers in the same category and the majority of them drive smaller vehicles like delivery vans. And this matters because it’s going to be pretty hard to replace delivery drivers with self-driving vehicles. Why? Because there still needs to be someone there to make the delivery.

Finally, Doctorow points out, even if AI-powered self-driving vehicles did take over big rig trucking the economic impact would be negligible because the industry is already so precarious and underpaid (a fact Carlson rather notably does not raise in the exchange) and because there would need to be a dedicated highway lane (which is just another way of saying AI boosters may soon make real that fantastical projection of the futurist imagination called a “train”).

While I don’t think this information moots the thesis of the original piece, I do think there are some interesting takeaways here. One is just that this is clearly a case study in Silicon Valley misinformation, which has been a more longstanding problem for which credulous science and tech journalism is at least partly to blame.

Second, and more notably I think, Carlson’s ill-founded intervention is yet another reminder that what passes for class politics on the right is usually about something else entirely. So much of the newly pro-worker conservatism we keep hearing about is really just rebranded conservatism of a more familiar kind. It’s not, fundamentally, about the working class as an economic or material category but rather as a collection of aesthetic signifiers that really stand in for other things: hierarchy, a patriarchal concept of the family, reactionary nostalgia for an idealized age of single-income, male breadwinner households before those godawful feminists started burning their bras and demanding equality.

In this case, it seems, Carlson was so keen to push his own socially conservative line he didn’t bother to make sure that the statistic he was citing was true. And even if he’d known it wasn’t, it seems doubtful he would have cared.