AI Populism
Context
Joseph Gelfer:
"Right-wingers have made a habit of co-opting issues that progressives left lying around. Patriotism, family, community, working-class identity: each was once available to the left and has been steadily annexed because no one else was prepared to speak about it in language ordinary people recognised.
AI is sitting in exactly the same position. The technocratic centre is talking about productivity gains and responsible deployment. The activist left is focused on existential risk or on resisting AI altogether. Neither offers a populist political programme that meets people where their actual anxiety lives: in the question of whether their work, their wages and their kids’ futures will survive the next five years.
If credible actors do not enter this space soon, they will hand it to people who will use it badly. AI populism is coming. The only open question is whether it will be a politics that actually defends the people whose name it invokes, or another performance in which working people are once again the audience rather than the beneficiaries."
(https://www.savageminds.co/p/ai-populism-could-redeem-the-ai-transition?)
Description
Joseph Gelfer:
"Populism, in any form worth the name, is not a stylistic flourish you can bolt onto an existing agenda. It is a politics that names a divide between ordinary people and an out-of-touch elite, and proposes to do something about it in plain language that actually lands with the mythical “ordinary person”: more than this, it is a particular vibe, aesthetic, and energy. Many progressives keep mistaking the top-level language of populism for the substance: they think calling themselves populist will make them popular; they think they can stealthily diffuse progressive ideology without anyone noticing. Regular folks are not dim, and they pick up on this immediately.
AI populism, properly understood, is the political deployment of AI-related anxiety in service of a programme that claims to defend ordinary working people against a transformation being imposed on them by elites. It is, in essence, an AI Just Transition platform with the volume turned up: with policies on retraining, redistribution of productivity gains, protection of livelihoods, scrutiny of who benefits and who pays. All with that particular vibe, aesthetic, and energy. The intellectual scaffolding for this politics already exists. What is missing is anyone willing to pick it up and run with it: typically, progressives find dwelling in the gutter — which is where populism typically resides — just too uncomfortable for the delicate sensibilities."
(https://www.savageminds.co/p/ai-populism-could-redeem-the-ai-transition?)
Typology
Joseph Gelfer:
"AI populism can go two ways.
The first is genuine: a politics that takes the anxiety seriously and builds an actual programme: fee-and-dividend mechanisms on AI productivity gains, sectoral transition funds, real worker voice in deployment decisions, regulation of compute and data infrastructure tied to public benefit. This version would do for the AI transition what the New Deal did for industrial capitalism. It would be uncomfortable for incumbents and deeply popular with everyone else.
The second is a scam: a politics that performs concern for ordinary people while quietly serving the interests of the same capital that is deploying the technology. This version stages the rhetoric — the rallies, the enemies-of-the-people speeches, the “I will protect your job” promises — but legislates in the opposite direction. It would convert real grievance into electoral fuel and then betray it, which is to say it would do for the AI transition what standard right-wing populism has done for almost every other issue it has touched."
(https://www.savageminds.co/p/ai-populism-could-redeem-the-ai-transition?)