The feeling of moving forward, tomorrow is going to be better, we had that in the seventies maybe even the eighties. Now we still work but the feeling is that we've our legs kicked out from under us. Oh we've been told that trickle down will raise us all, bullshit, but that is still the claim. Our government has forgotten their job, to provide the best life for it's citizens as possible. A government of, by, and for the people. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Fine words, noble aspiration, destroyed by money. Our government has been bought, we don't need a chart to see that. Get money out of politics, tax aggressively, provide for the people, reign in untethered capitalism, or when enough people get fed up what happens will make the French revolution look like a garden party.
Howard, the section on "reshuffle" and how "a job used to be a whole, but AI turns it into tasks" really resonated. The anxiety on that scatter plot isn't about the technology itself — it's about who captures the value when work gets unbundled. I'm seeing this play out with leaders across Latin America: once AI is on the table, the real bottleneck surfaces not in the model but in how work itself is defined and who owns it.
I just wrote a piece arguing that the bottleneck isn't AI — it never was. It's about organizational clarity and how knowledge work gets structured around new capabilities. When you see organizations that are actually thriving with AI adoption, what's different about how they're framing the value capture for their people?
You’re so right, Diego. It's the organizational design underneath that decides whether people feel lifted up or hollowed out.
The companies doing this well don't start with "how do we automate tasks." They start with "what do we want this role to become?" That's the ATM story all over again. The job didn't disappear. It got upgraded.
Man the high speed rail is so funny. California has been talking about it since 1980, and they just use all the money for graft and never build anything. 6th largest economy in the world in the richest country in history.
Taiwan just shit that thing out in 8 years. Not even officially a country. Just built it.
I think to your broader point, no infrastructure has been built in this country for like 70 years. They make improvements all the time. We no longer have the substructure to provide the basic services of a bation state. The ground is literally crumbling beneath every Americans feet. Hard to hope when the basic systems of governance is falling apart.
You are so right, bob! Taiwan is a perfect comparison. And when the basic infrastructure is falling apart around you, why would you trust the next big promise? The anxiety on that chart isn't irrational. It's earned.
True. I think that the media hype in the west is less than helpful, driven by motivation to gain more eyes on articles which converts into more advertising time and revenue. And that really is the bottomline - everyone is a commodity at the end of the day, no exceptions.
That is currently the social contract that everyone buys into and agrees to with every click that they make online. I don't live in China, and I am really not sure that I would want to. I live in the west which has been overtaken by billionaire greed, and I am not sure that I want to live here either.
I am not sure what the answers are that we need - perhaps more regulation from governments - but certainly one of them has to be educating people to understand that brainless death-scrolling has become a disease, one that is effectively self-inflicted to a degree. I know that platforms are geared to encourage non-stop engagement, but we as individuals, have to power to decided how we're going to respond - continue scrolling and clicking or change course... If we continue, we remain trapped, dealing with monsters that we allow to be planted into our minds, and which we, through our online behavior, continue to nurture and grow, or we can become disciplined, limit our scrolling, turn off our technology for periods of time, interact with friends, talk to people, read good books (fiction and non-fiction), look for and find inspiration to solve that big problem that has been niggling for a while, using the experience to learn and open new opportunities that were closed off to us before.
These are things that each of us need to get to:
- to recognize good and bad stuff (what can I change, what can I not)
- respond to each appropriately.
Leave the rage and the fascination behind. It is only making someone else money, and it does damage one, sometimes severely.
Spot on, Michael. We renew that social contract with every click. Uncomfortable, but empowering.
Platforms deserve scrutiny, but waiting for governments to fix it is its own trap. The good news is we each have the power to change course. Put the phone down. Read. Talk to people. Find the problem worth solving.
Ill be heading to china for my honeymoon also, I’m pretty sure everyone should take a look at what we all could have had if we didn’t let the billionaires go wild
HS2 is a painful example. Congratulations on the wedding, by the way. China’s infrastructure will be fun to experience. The high-speed rail alone is quite of something. Enjoy!
"For low-income men, real earnings have fallen, with lower pay and fewer hours worked"
here in Commiefornia we work MORE hours to take up the slack of the workers which were laid off to improve "profits" while keeping the same pay or sometimes are asked to take voluntary cuts.
but we do get to keep our original sh*t title from first hire, created by HR departments which no one really understands what it is they do. however there are always creative ways to keep from paying us overtime or tracking every minute to prevent it!
and in the near future we will be taking on another title-less role:
proofreading, proofing, repairing and damage control caused by fallout of Fai excretions!
Here is my insight to the Asian bubble on your cloud point chart at the top of this artiicle:
The Asian worker but especially company and crap-o-ration owners have all experienced some levels of prosperity, to them, despite us here in the west using the term slave-wage.
China man knows that fat boy Heinz (Henry Kissenger) brought them money, when he gave them our jobs, they would have NEVER been able to earn otherwise!
take one look at their wage increases alone: 1970s 1 day of work=$ .70
"For low-income men, real earnings have fallen, with lower pay and fewer hours worked"
here in Commiefornia we work MORE hours to take up the slack of the workers which were laid off to improve "profits" while keeping the same pay or sometimes are asked to take voluntary cuts.
but we do get to keep our original sh*t title from first hire, created by HR departments which no one really understands what it is they do. however there are always creative ways to keep from paying us overtime or tracking every minute to prevent it!
and in the near future we will be taking on another title-less role:
proofreading, proofing, repairing and damage control caused by fallout of Fai excretions!
Here is my insight to the Asian bubble on your cloud point chart at the top of this artiicle:
The Asian worker but especially company and crap-o-ration owners have all experienced some levels of prosperity, to them, despite us here in the west using the term slave-wage.
China man knows that fat boy Heinz (Henry Kissenger) brought them money, when he gave them our jobs, they would have NEVER been able to earn otherwise!
take one look at their wage increases alone: 1970s 1 day of work=$ .70
This is an interesting piece that offers a lot of unique perspectives and insights, but I feel that the section about 'The Engineering State' has a glaring omission by not addressing how supposed AI progress feels "visible" in the US. It's hardly mentioned how the excitement and optimism of Asian countries can, at least in part, be attributed to how all of the US’s production of AI products (CPUs, GPUs, consumer electronics, etc) injects billions of real dollars into Asian economies, while the actual ROI of any of this is still very speculative in the US. When China makes AI products, China benefits. When the US "makes" AI products, most of the manufacturing gets outsourced to China, and China still benefits. Their gains are realized now - in dollars banked, jobs created, and hard manufacturing skills developed - while in the US, the capitalist-class makes the stock numbers go up by cutting jobs and making promises on automating workflows via a hallucinating chatbot that's incentivized to always agree with you (while never asking for a raise or complaining about working conditions).
This general sentiment is set up in the previous 'The Teenager Who Almost Jumped' section by noting that it's "progress without protection, innovation without trust", but The Engineering State neglects to mention how the "visibility" of so-called AI progress has been almost purely negative for the American working class -- and it's not just the lack of high-speed rail.
In the same (or perhaps, inverse) ways that "China’s optimism is largely a lived experience", American anxiety and wariness towards AI is a lived experience as well.
wait a minute here. dont forget china no longer manufacturers our goods for us.
they stopped buying our trash and we stopped buying theirs.
however our products keep refilling our shelves.
i guess its all coming from warehouses the size of small countries in the midwest somewhere, since we are such avid consumers.
And god knows damn well we dont know how to make stuff anymore.
and the few factories that miraculously survived, their workers, young low level laborers the only ones able to deal with the rigors of that kind of work. have to scrap for all the overtime they can get, but usually keep a second job or some kinda side hustle to feed their family since these jobs dont pay a damn. afterall they are competing with chinese made goods, oh damnit i forgot again we dont get things from china anymore - except for cellphones.
then prices of everything doubled during the ScumDemonic throwing a low dipping curveball to youngsters that are all going to become programmers for video games anyway.
Thank you so much for the careful read and the thoughtful reflection. It really means a lot.
This week I’ve been in Shenzhen, and just last month I was at Kendall Square in Cambridge. You can feel the contrast in mood on the ground, almost immediately. And when you sit down with companies, it becomes even sharper.
In the US, the conversation gravitates quickly, and relentlessly, toward profitability, margins, and share price. In Shenzhen, they can’t stop talking about market share and control of core technologies. I remember walking away from one meeting thinking: wow, this is just a completely different way of seeing business reality.
No judgment at all. Just description. Two fundamentally different motivations. Two lenses on what success means, and when it should arrive.
Interesting and thought provoking piece. I think Tim Wu's The Age of Extraction also a good addition here. I read Power and Progress - has influenced what I do now.
Awesome, thank you for sharing so many great ideas and book recommendations!
As for the chart on the top - I don't subscribe to the notion of treating countries like some sort of "extra" persons who feel and think. Because they don't. What is the point of putting a dot there representing "the USA" when there are individuals in Palo Alto sitting firm on the bottom right of the chart and others (perhaps in Cody, WY, or anywhere else) not budging from the top left of the chart?
I for one am not to be found where "Switzerland" sits but in the very top left corner of your chart.
This is interesting analysis for sure. I wonder if the reason is, in addition to what you're suggesting, that people who build stuff are more optimistic than people who consume stuff. This would be a more clean fit vs. geographical or even national. Mexico for example is an interesting outlier - could it be because of this affinity to building/creating?
Optimism is also a complex emotion.. It's more possible to be optimistic if you're poor but see possibilities. If you're rich, I wonder if optimism is even something they care about or can feel. Hope and optimism are delicacies that the poor can enjoy under the right conditions.
To put it rather graphically, there's the sex of first love filled with all the rush of emotions and colors (the people excited) vs. the sex of porn stars (depressing, performative at best).
Interesting take. And it could also be affluent nations are playing not to lose, meanwhile, the less affluent has less to lose and thus playing to win…?
The feeling of moving forward, tomorrow is going to be better, we had that in the seventies maybe even the eighties. Now we still work but the feeling is that we've our legs kicked out from under us. Oh we've been told that trickle down will raise us all, bullshit, but that is still the claim. Our government has forgotten their job, to provide the best life for it's citizens as possible. A government of, by, and for the people. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Fine words, noble aspiration, destroyed by money. Our government has been bought, we don't need a chart to see that. Get money out of politics, tax aggressively, provide for the people, reign in untethered capitalism, or when enough people get fed up what happens will make the French revolution look like a garden party.
The real divide may not be AI anxiety vs AI optimism.
It is execution capacity.
AI only becomes transformative when it connects to energy, manufacturing, logistics, robotics, education, capital allocation, and state capacity.
Belief is narrative.
Conversion is power.
Howard, the section on "reshuffle" and how "a job used to be a whole, but AI turns it into tasks" really resonated. The anxiety on that scatter plot isn't about the technology itself — it's about who captures the value when work gets unbundled. I'm seeing this play out with leaders across Latin America: once AI is on the table, the real bottleneck surfaces not in the model but in how work itself is defined and who owns it.
I just wrote a piece arguing that the bottleneck isn't AI — it never was. It's about organizational clarity and how knowledge work gets structured around new capabilities. When you see organizations that are actually thriving with AI adoption, what's different about how they're framing the value capture for their people?
You’re so right, Diego. It's the organizational design underneath that decides whether people feel lifted up or hollowed out.
The companies doing this well don't start with "how do we automate tasks." They start with "what do we want this role to become?" That's the ATM story all over again. The job didn't disappear. It got upgraded.
Would love to read your piece. Drop the link!
Man the high speed rail is so funny. California has been talking about it since 1980, and they just use all the money for graft and never build anything. 6th largest economy in the world in the richest country in history.
Taiwan just shit that thing out in 8 years. Not even officially a country. Just built it.
I think to your broader point, no infrastructure has been built in this country for like 70 years. They make improvements all the time. We no longer have the substructure to provide the basic services of a bation state. The ground is literally crumbling beneath every Americans feet. Hard to hope when the basic systems of governance is falling apart.
You are so right, bob! Taiwan is a perfect comparison. And when the basic infrastructure is falling apart around you, why would you trust the next big promise? The anxiety on that chart isn't irrational. It's earned.
The US and English speaking countries made the Terminator movies starting in the 1980’s.
We’ve thought about the implications of AI for decades.
We know how this story ends.
True. I think that the media hype in the west is less than helpful, driven by motivation to gain more eyes on articles which converts into more advertising time and revenue. And that really is the bottomline - everyone is a commodity at the end of the day, no exceptions.
That is currently the social contract that everyone buys into and agrees to with every click that they make online. I don't live in China, and I am really not sure that I would want to. I live in the west which has been overtaken by billionaire greed, and I am not sure that I want to live here either.
I am not sure what the answers are that we need - perhaps more regulation from governments - but certainly one of them has to be educating people to understand that brainless death-scrolling has become a disease, one that is effectively self-inflicted to a degree. I know that platforms are geared to encourage non-stop engagement, but we as individuals, have to power to decided how we're going to respond - continue scrolling and clicking or change course... If we continue, we remain trapped, dealing with monsters that we allow to be planted into our minds, and which we, through our online behavior, continue to nurture and grow, or we can become disciplined, limit our scrolling, turn off our technology for periods of time, interact with friends, talk to people, read good books (fiction and non-fiction), look for and find inspiration to solve that big problem that has been niggling for a while, using the experience to learn and open new opportunities that were closed off to us before.
These are things that each of us need to get to:
- to recognize good and bad stuff (what can I change, what can I not)
- respond to each appropriately.
Leave the rage and the fascination behind. It is only making someone else money, and it does damage one, sometimes severely.
Spot on, Michael. We renew that social contract with every click. Uncomfortable, but empowering.
Platforms deserve scrutiny, but waiting for governments to fix it is its own trap. The good news is we each have the power to change course. Put the phone down. Read. Talk to people. Find the problem worth solving.
Spot on, same for the UK also with HS2.
Ill be heading to china for my honeymoon also, I’m pretty sure everyone should take a look at what we all could have had if we didn’t let the billionaires go wild
HS2 is a painful example. Congratulations on the wedding, by the way. China’s infrastructure will be fun to experience. The high-speed rail alone is quite of something. Enjoy!
USA
"For low-income men, real earnings have fallen, with lower pay and fewer hours worked"
here in Commiefornia we work MORE hours to take up the slack of the workers which were laid off to improve "profits" while keeping the same pay or sometimes are asked to take voluntary cuts.
but we do get to keep our original sh*t title from first hire, created by HR departments which no one really understands what it is they do. however there are always creative ways to keep from paying us overtime or tracking every minute to prevent it!
and in the near future we will be taking on another title-less role:
proofreading, proofing, repairing and damage control caused by fallout of Fai excretions!
Here is my insight to the Asian bubble on your cloud point chart at the top of this artiicle:
The Asian worker but especially company and crap-o-ration owners have all experienced some levels of prosperity, to them, despite us here in the west using the term slave-wage.
China man knows that fat boy Heinz (Henry Kissenger) brought them money, when he gave them our jobs, they would have NEVER been able to earn otherwise!
take one look at their wage increases alone: 1970s 1 day of work=$ .70
1990s same days paid $ 7.0.
white man good. what could possibly go wrong?
aw-snap!
USA
"For low-income men, real earnings have fallen, with lower pay and fewer hours worked"
here in Commiefornia we work MORE hours to take up the slack of the workers which were laid off to improve "profits" while keeping the same pay or sometimes are asked to take voluntary cuts.
but we do get to keep our original sh*t title from first hire, created by HR departments which no one really understands what it is they do. however there are always creative ways to keep from paying us overtime or tracking every minute to prevent it!
and in the near future we will be taking on another title-less role:
proofreading, proofing, repairing and damage control caused by fallout of Fai excretions!
Here is my insight to the Asian bubble on your cloud point chart at the top of this artiicle:
The Asian worker but especially company and crap-o-ration owners have all experienced some levels of prosperity, to them, despite us here in the west using the term slave-wage.
China man knows that fat boy Heinz (Henry Kissenger) brought them money, when he gave them our jobs, they would have NEVER been able to earn otherwise!
take one look at their wage increases alone: 1970s 1 day of work=$ .70
1990s same days paid $ 7.0.
white man good. what could possibly go wrong?
aw-snap!
This is an interesting piece that offers a lot of unique perspectives and insights, but I feel that the section about 'The Engineering State' has a glaring omission by not addressing how supposed AI progress feels "visible" in the US. It's hardly mentioned how the excitement and optimism of Asian countries can, at least in part, be attributed to how all of the US’s production of AI products (CPUs, GPUs, consumer electronics, etc) injects billions of real dollars into Asian economies, while the actual ROI of any of this is still very speculative in the US. When China makes AI products, China benefits. When the US "makes" AI products, most of the manufacturing gets outsourced to China, and China still benefits. Their gains are realized now - in dollars banked, jobs created, and hard manufacturing skills developed - while in the US, the capitalist-class makes the stock numbers go up by cutting jobs and making promises on automating workflows via a hallucinating chatbot that's incentivized to always agree with you (while never asking for a raise or complaining about working conditions).
This general sentiment is set up in the previous 'The Teenager Who Almost Jumped' section by noting that it's "progress without protection, innovation without trust", but The Engineering State neglects to mention how the "visibility" of so-called AI progress has been almost purely negative for the American working class -- and it's not just the lack of high-speed rail.
In the same (or perhaps, inverse) ways that "China’s optimism is largely a lived experience", American anxiety and wariness towards AI is a lived experience as well.
wait a minute here. dont forget china no longer manufacturers our goods for us.
they stopped buying our trash and we stopped buying theirs.
however our products keep refilling our shelves.
i guess its all coming from warehouses the size of small countries in the midwest somewhere, since we are such avid consumers.
And god knows damn well we dont know how to make stuff anymore.
and the few factories that miraculously survived, their workers, young low level laborers the only ones able to deal with the rigors of that kind of work. have to scrap for all the overtime they can get, but usually keep a second job or some kinda side hustle to feed their family since these jobs dont pay a damn. afterall they are competing with chinese made goods, oh damnit i forgot again we dont get things from china anymore - except for cellphones.
then prices of everything doubled during the ScumDemonic throwing a low dipping curveball to youngsters that are all going to become programmers for video games anyway.
oh, no, Fai is going to be doing that now.
i am sooooo confused. what is it i just said?
Thank you so much for the careful read and the thoughtful reflection. It really means a lot.
This week I’ve been in Shenzhen, and just last month I was at Kendall Square in Cambridge. You can feel the contrast in mood on the ground, almost immediately. And when you sit down with companies, it becomes even sharper.
In the US, the conversation gravitates quickly, and relentlessly, toward profitability, margins, and share price. In Shenzhen, they can’t stop talking about market share and control of core technologies. I remember walking away from one meeting thinking: wow, this is just a completely different way of seeing business reality.
No judgment at all. Just description. Two fundamentally different motivations. Two lenses on what success means, and when it should arrive.
Thanks again for sharing!
Thanks for the chart! I'm moving to Japan
:) I have a lot of friends loving there.
Interesting and thought provoking piece. I think Tim Wu's The Age of Extraction also a good addition here. I read Power and Progress - has influenced what I do now.
Awesome, thank you for sharing so many great ideas and book recommendations!
As for the chart on the top - I don't subscribe to the notion of treating countries like some sort of "extra" persons who feel and think. Because they don't. What is the point of putting a dot there representing "the USA" when there are individuals in Palo Alto sitting firm on the bottom right of the chart and others (perhaps in Cody, WY, or anywhere else) not budging from the top left of the chart?
I for one am not to be found where "Switzerland" sits but in the very top left corner of your chart.
This is interesting analysis for sure. I wonder if the reason is, in addition to what you're suggesting, that people who build stuff are more optimistic than people who consume stuff. This would be a more clean fit vs. geographical or even national. Mexico for example is an interesting outlier - could it be because of this affinity to building/creating?
Optimism is also a complex emotion.. It's more possible to be optimistic if you're poor but see possibilities. If you're rich, I wonder if optimism is even something they care about or can feel. Hope and optimism are delicacies that the poor can enjoy under the right conditions.
To put it rather graphically, there's the sex of first love filled with all the rush of emotions and colors (the people excited) vs. the sex of porn stars (depressing, performative at best).
Interesting take. And it could also be affluent nations are playing not to lose, meanwhile, the less affluent has less to lose and thus playing to win…?
That's a very good way to capture it
So glad that you find it helpful!
Thank you for this article. A nice a novel view (at least for me!) about the world.
Whao! So happy that you like it!
Under Islamic slavery Amazon workers would eat the same food and wear the same clothes as Jeff Bezos.