How the Cotton Gin Nearly Destroyed us and Why Artificial Intelligence is Even More Dangerous

The cotton gin was an ingenious piece of technology, mechanizing the backbreaking job of picking cotton by hand.

However, its effects caused 690,000 deaths and almost ended the American experiment.

Here’s why.

At the time of its invention, in 1793, slavery was a dying institution. Picking cotton was so onerous that the plantation system was close to being phased out as economically impossible. Given that trajectory. the Civil War would not have occurred.

The gin changed all that. Its efficiencies made slavery profitable again and that wretched world was revived. As a result, the collision between North and South erupted with the catastrophic loss of life on the battlefield and widespread destruction of the Southern infrastructure.

Artificial Intelligence, a technological triumph, poses a similar threat.

We are already facing a big problem in a world where an IQ of at least 85 is required for meaningful employment, and where millions of good workers can’t meet that threshold. Social unrest is simmering.

Artificial intelligence adds a huge layer of workplace obsolescence on top of our present situation, where many high IQ jobs in the professions are going to be wiped out. Elon Musk has compared the danger to nuclear war. Unlike the historic transformation of farming, where people could migrate to the cities to work in factories, there is no place for terminated workers to go.

Let that sink in.

Solutions are put forth of a very short work week, and of a guaranteed income.

Dicey, but those appear to be all we have to work with. The psychological cost of losing the dignity of a meaningful job will need policies that haven’t been invented yet.

We need a Manhattan Project, like the one to create an atomic bomb, to make a new world.

Faster, please.