Young and Confident

 In his one-of-a-kind travelogue/memoir, Erdogan Pizza, John Dolan writes at one point about the capitalist revolution that swept through industrial China in the 1980s—part of the country's Deng Xiaoping era of opening up—and set off a craze for new spiritual movements among the elderly and others suddenly confronted with unprecedented change. 

"China in the first generation of restored capitalism must've been exciting as Hell if you were young and confident," he writes, "but terrifying if you were anything else." 

Much the same could be said of our current era of rapid technological evolution. The big papers have all published profiles in recent days of the young and confident Bay Area tech kids who have taken to the new era of OpenClaw "AI agents" like it's their native element. 

Instead of being displaced by the technology, they are using it to achieve new excesses of maniacal, Stakhanovite productivity. They are running four, five, ten digital agents at a time on various projects. And whenever they find themselves with a moment to spare, they are beset by guilt. They feel they ought to be using the extra minute to instruct another agent. 

The point of these articles appears to be something like: see? Human beings are endlessly adaptable. AI doesn't mean the end of work or the end of software developers. The fittest among them—the "young and confident"—are still finding ways to survive and thrive in the new technological environment.

For decades, magazines like the Economist have been selling us on the successive waves of Thatcherism, neoliberalism, globalization, automation, etc. by pointing to similar examples. "See? This is all a good thing. The top 2% of the most dynamic, adaptable, and neurally-plastic members of the human population are able to get along just fine in this brave new world. Indeed, they are doing better than ever! So—what's wrong with you?" 

Seldom asked is the question of whether the world is only for the youngest and most confident among us—whether society was made only to serve the 2% of the most dynamic—or whether it ought to have something for everybody. 

Look not alone on youthful prime, 

Or manhood's active might; 

Man then is useful to his kind, 

Supported in his right: 

But see him on the edge of life, 

With cares and sorrows worn—as Robert Burns once wrote. 

Indeed, human society has to have some answer it can give—some explanation of how it expects them to survive—to the multitude of creatures who are not "young and confident"; who are not in their "youthful prime." 

When I read these articles about the confident digital natives setting off ten, twelve, thirty AI agents on their little productivity adventures, and spending all day shouting at and drilling their virtual minions on various coding tasks—and then am told that this proves society can adapt to an AI-centric economy—I think back to a scene I recently witnessed. 

My dad was hospitalized for a few days at the start of the month with an infection. And whenever the social workers would come by his room with their clip boards, they would ask him the same rote and vaguely demeaning questions: are you having trouble dressing yourself? Feeding yourself? Bathing? 

That was the bar for them. That was their standard of success. Can you wash and clothe yourself. 

And how much of humanity cannot say even that much? Let alone compete successfully with the small fraction of humanity that is wholly comfortable at the bleeding edge of the new AI economy. 

A recent viral X post had a bunch of manic advice for how people are supposed to survive in the AI age: "Learn these tools. Get proficient. Demonstrate what's possible. If you're early enough, this is how you move up: by being the person who understands what's coming and can show others how to navigate it." 

Well, hold on a minute. For a lot of people out there, just getting out of bed in the morning is a big achievement. Asking them to figure out how to find new sources of productive success that even the advice-giver cannot quite imagine is a tall order. 

The question we should be asking about any new technological revolution is not: is there some handful among us who will be saved because they are exceptional? But: what is supposed to happen to those who are not at the very peak right now of their cognitive and physical abilities—those who are on the "edge of life," as Burns put it? 

It's the same question Thomas Carlyle imagined all the displaced weavers asking at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, in his Past and Present: 

"Behold us here, so many thousands, millions, and increasing at the rate of fifty every hour. [...] We ask, If you mean to lead us towards work;  to try to lead us,—by ways new, never yet heard of till this new unheard-of Time? Or if you declare that you cannot lead us?  And expect that we are to remain quietly unled, and in a composed manner perish of starvation?  What is it you expect of us? What is it you mean to do with us?"

The votaries of the new order never get that far. They point to all the young and dynamic people who are thriving, and think that a sufficient answer. All is justified because the 98th percentile of the most adaptable and cognitively plastic have found their powers of productivity unleashed. 

But how is everyone else supposed to live? As Naughty by Nature would put it: they "won't, that's how." As John Davidson writes in "Thirty Bob a Week": "we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck." 

Unless, that is, we are willing to entertain for a change the heretical thought of Robert Frost—whose sentiment in this regard you will never see in the pages of the Economist: Bounds should be set/ To ingenuity for being so cruel/ In bringing change unheralded[.] 

It might have helped some of those elderly displaced Chinese people in the 1980s—and spared the world some pretty weird spiritual movements that are still among us.