2026-09-16 14:08:15
After days of thinking about the possibility that AI might kill all of humanity, it’s almost a relief to be able to write about a lighter topic — like how the xenophobic Right is threatening to tear my country apart.
Who is Bo French? No one of much consequence. He’s a mostly failed Texan politician — the heir to an oil company, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who alienated his business partners, who lost two Republican primaries for the Texas House of Representatives before finally becoming the chair of a county-level party chapter. He finally got his first political success this year, when he won a narrow primary victory and became the GOP nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner. He currently trails his Democratic opponent in the polls.
Bo French isn’t that important, but this week he set off a national firestorm when he tweeted the above photo of a bunch of Indian kids celebrating University of Texas football at a Longhorns game, along with some alarmist anti-Indian rhetoric:
It was hardly a surprise that French tweeted something like this. He’s tweeted plenty of stuff along the same lines in the past. Here are two famous examples:
He’s also repeatedly called for the deportation of 100 million people; since there are only 50 million foreign-born people living in the United States, this means French was either getting his numbers wrong, or (more likely) calling for deporting tens of millions of American citizens. Reading his tweets, it’s not hard to imagine which citizens he’d choose for deportation.
It wouldn’t be fair to say that French’s race-war ideology has taken over the GOP. Plenty of Texas Republicans, including outgoing Senator John Cornyn, Senator Ted Cruz, Representative Jared Patterson, Representative Lacey Hull, and others publicly denounced his tweet. Karl Rove declared that he’d vote for the Democrat over French. Governor Greg Abbott, who has endorsed French despite his history of similar tweets, was milder in his criticism, but still affirmed the fundamental Texan-ness of the football fans in the picture:
“That is not my message,” Abbott said. “A selective picture of Longhorn fans celebrating our biggest home victory-ever-actually shows a way that Texans unite. We all support our college football teams.”
“The way we win the state is the same way we win football games,” Abbott added. “We unite under the brand of Texas.”
But despite these official condemnations, it’s easy to tell which way the wind is blowing among the GOP base. All of the Republican tweets denouncing French were heavily attacked on X. Rightist journalists, activists, and even a few GOP politicians poured out of the woodwork to support French and affirm his message. Here are a few examples:
French himself, who had been pressured to delete his poll about Jews and Muslims last year, now felt encouraged enough to double down on his anti-Indian tweet.
I can’t tell you whether the New Right — represented by French and his supporters in the right-wing media — will prevail over the Republican establishment. But watching the movement go after a bunch of Texas college football fans tells us something important about the New Right as a movement.
What it tells us is that if you’re a nonwhite immigrant, or the child of nonwhite immigrants, it doesn’t matter what you do — the New Right will still view you as an enemy and as an invader.
It doesn’t matter whether you or your parents came to this country legally. How many times have we heard rightists shout “Illegal vs. legal!!” in response to anyone who defends immigration? Many regular Americans care about “illegal vs. legal”, but the New Right does not. Everyone in that UT photo either came to America legally, or was born to parents who came here legally. It didn’t matter to Bo French, or the people who defended him.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re high-skilled or low-skilled. How many times have we heard rightists complain that immigrants come to America because they want welfare benefits? And yet everyone in the UT photo is going to spend their lifetime paying taxes to support native-born Americans on Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security Disability. Indian Americans in general are the highest-earning group in the country, and those who go to a good college like the University of Texas are going to beat that average.
That matters to many regular voters, but it doesn’t matter at all to the New Right. Yes, they’ll shout about poor (nonwhite) immigrants on welfare. But when they encounter nonwhite immigrant groups who make lots of money, they suddenly pivot to accusing those groups of stealing their jobs and their spots in colleges. There’s just no way to win.
It also doesn’t matter whether you assimilate or not. Yes, if you speak a foreign language or build a Hindu temple or wear traditional Indian clothing, the New Right will scream their heads off about it. “Alien invaders!!”, they’ll cry. But if you put on a University of Texas sweater and go to football games, they’ll still scream “Alien invaders!!” when they see you in a photo. It’s who you are that bothers them, not what you do.
Nor does it matter whether your entire ethnic group is well-behaved. Indian Americans are incarcerated at only 25% of the rate of non-Hispanic White Americans. And basically none of the people in the photo that frightened Bo French will ever go to jail. That probably matters to some voters, but not to the New Right.
In fact, it doesn’t even matter if you vote Republican. As a matter of fact, Donald Trump won a pretty solid victory among Asian people in Texas (which includes Indians):
It’s not clear whether Bo French and his fellow New Rightists are even aware of this fact, but what is clear is that it didn’t matter to them at all.1
This is why there is no pro-immigration argument that will ever sway members of the New Right. You can give them research showing that high-skilled immigrants raise employment and wages for native-born Americans, and they’ll either disbelieve it or (usually) ignore it. You can talk about Nobel-winning scientists and Operation Paperclip all you want, and it won’t make a dent. You can cite statistics about immigrant entrepreneurship and job creation, you can talk about how Satya Nadella saved Microsoft and Sanjay Mehrotra is the reason why America still has a presence in the memory industry. They will counter with some fabricated anecdote about how their friend got fired from their company because Indians came in and only hired other Indians.2
So why am I even talking about this? If the New Right can never be persuaded to stop thinking of brown faces as invaders, then why discuss this topic at all?
Well, two reasons, actually. First, it helps us more clearly understand the New Right as a movement — how they think and what they want. Most importantly, they see the world in terms of collective zero-sum competition between groups.
To the New Right, if Indians get into the University of Texas, it means that White people must have been “replaced” at that university — or at American universities in general. Bo French himself tweeted that the presence of Indian students at American universities is evidence that “they hate white Americans and prioritize everyone else”. They do not even consider the possibility that the Indian kids got in because of individual merit. If an Indian American succeeds, that represents not the success of that singular individual, but a win for Team Indian in general.
And the New Right worldview sees any win for Team Indian — or Team Asian, or Team Hispanic, etc. — as a loss for Team White. Nowhere do they consider the possibility that the system might not be zero-sum. The fact that the number of freshmen admitted to UT grew from 15,000 in 2011 to 19,000 in 2021 means nothing to them. The historical fact that Italian and Jewish and Polish and Japanese Americans attained economic success sixty years ago without consigning WASP Americans to poverty is lost on them — as is every other example in which immigrant groups and existing groups succeeded in America side by side.
Crucially, this zero-sum assumption is why the New Right constantly shrinks their tent instead of expanding it. In principle, even if you see the world as a collective interaction between groups rather than individuals, that interaction doesn’t have to be zero-sum — you can have alliances between groups, for mutual benefit. The Christian conservatives of the 1970s and 1980s accepted Catholics, “white ethnics”, and some Jews into their coalition as “co-belligerents”, and won many battles as a result.
The New Right had a golden opportunity to do something similar after Trump’s victory in 2024. Hispanic and Asian voters (and even some Black voters) shifted strongly toward the Republicans, and toward Trump specifically. But instead of embracing that influx of new voters and building a big conservative tent to defeat wokeness and progressivism and the Democrats, they went all-in on race war.
Stephen Miller relied so heavily on racial profiling for his mass deportation efforts that many Hispanics felt that Trump had betrayed them. Muslim voters might have gone back to the GOP, but rightists made resistance to Muslim immigration a “civilizational” crusade. Jewish voters turned off by the antisemitism of the Left might have switched their allegiance to the GOP, but the New Right allowed Nazi apologetics to fester within their ranks.
Now it’s Indians’ turn to feel the sting of unprovoked rightist attacks. All those kids in Texas wanted to do was to cheer for their football team; instead, a political movement is calling for their ethnic cleansing simply because they showed up at the stadium. As a result, despite the best efforts of Republicans like Cornyn, the GOP is poised to mobilize and piss off a group of Americans who are just about as numerous as Jews — and who earn even more money.
It’s this pathological inability to understand alliances and coalition-building that will ultimately doom the New Right. Like the far Left, this is a movement built to exclude and divide and splinter — both because of the querulous personalities of rightists themselves, and because of the intransigence of a racial ideology that abhors any impurity. If they ever managed to see off the Hispanics and the Asians, the rightists would start in on the Greeks and the Italians, and so on. There’s no victory in sight — only eternal conflict. These are not nation-builders; they are nation-dismantlers.
Coming to grips with the extremism and intransigence of the New Right also helps us understand what an unpopular fringe they really are. The New Right screams and shouts and acts very aggressive on X, but this aggression is just a way of concealing their numerical weakness. Most voters are not part of the New Right, and they don’t think that immigrants are invaders or that immigration is “replacement”. Most Americans say that immigration is a good thing as of today:
Essentially none of that 73% majority is going to be part of the New Right, and some portion of the 21% minority probably isn’t either. That means the New Right is a fringe movement — a very loud, very aggressive group of people who are adept at bullying regular Americans on certain social media platforms, but who ultimately lack the numbers to overcome the mainstream in a direct contest.
Just watch some of the reactions of the UT students who were targeted by Bo French and his racist social media hordes:
Consider how regular and non-alien those young people seem, compared to the screeching bigots attacking them on X for going to a football game. I guarantee you that the majority of regular, normal, non-internet-poisoned Americans will watch those videos and just want to say “Hook ‘em Horns”.3
That means that the immigration argument is winnable. A reasonable liberal position on immigration — one that respects the law, honors the democratic will of the people, and treats immigration as a privilege rather than a human right — has a good chance of winning over the majority of the country. The New Right can only succeed if they manage to divide and conquer the pro-immigration majority, as they did in 2024; immigration supporters should focus on making common cause with the persuadable center, in order to make sure 2024 isn’t repeated.
That means not treating all immigration skeptics the same. Republicans like John Cornyn, who like to see Indian American kids cheering for Texas football but who hate to see asylum seekers rewarded for illegally crossing the border, should not be lumped in with those who simply see any brown face and think “invader”. Xenophobes exist, and they are growing more powerful within the GOP, but not every Republican voter is a xenophobe, and not every restriction on immigration is xenophobic.
If Democrats understand and accept that fact, I think they will be able to turn the tide.4 Throughout America’s history, pro-immigration forces have won a lot more battles than they’ve lost, but it was never easy. It always required compromise, reassurance, moderation, and coalition-building. This is not the time for Democrats to respond to the maximalism of xenophobes like Bo French with maximalism of their own.
This also applies to the small and rather pitiful number of immigrants who go online and shout that immigration is “replacement” and “invasion”. It will not save them.
Not that anyone in the New Right actually cares about the research on this topic, but…It’s actually true that Indians, like basically every group in existence, do have some tendency to hire their co-ethnics, though whether this represents a bias is harder to say. What we do know is that Indians do it much less Vietnamese, Chinese, Mexican, South Korean, Filipino, Polish, or Russian people, but much more than Dominicans, Guatemalans, or Jamaicans.
And I say that as someone who grew up in College Station, Texas…
Indeed, the tide may already be turning; Trump is now underwater on the immigration issue:
But 52% to 47% is still a fairly slim margin; Dems can do better than this.
2026-09-14 09:43:28
This was the week that AI safety hit the big time. A 27-year-old AI researcher named Jacob Coxon quit his job at Anthropic, declaring that OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to create technology that could destroy the human race:
Other researchers echoed Coxon’s concern, stating their belief that AI has a reasonable chance of killing all of humanity within a very short space of time:
I’m not sure why this resignation and these statements went mega-viral. Plenty of researchers have made similar moves, and similar statements, over the past few years! Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of modern AI, quit Google back in 2023 over safety fears. Daniel Kokotajlo resigned from OpenAI in 2024, saying that the company wasn’t behaving responsibly in its drive toward superintelligence. William Saunders and Steve Adler did something similar. Mrinank Sharma left Anthropic earlier this year, and wrote a pretty well-read blog post about it.
What’s more, it’s been clear for years now that “AI could kill humanity” is a very common belief among AI researchers. Grace et al. (2024) interviewed thousands of AI researchers in 2024, and found that more than half thought that artificial superintelligence has a significant chance of making the human race go extinct (or causing similarly bad consequences):
The median AI researcher gave “doom” a 5-10% probability (depending on how the question was phrased), while their average probability was between 15% and 20%. Later, smaller surveys found similar numbers. The AI researchers may or may not be right, but the fact that lots of them think AI could kill the human race has never exactly been a secret.
It’s not clear why Coxon went so much more viral than his predecessors. Maybe it was the fact that AI just solved one of the most important open problems in mathematics (which the best human mathematicians had been unable to solve for almost a century). Or maybe it was the Hugging Face attack, where a swarm of AI agents tried to cheat on a test by hacking various companies. Or maybe AI has just obviously gotten so much smarter that people throughout society were starting to get worried.
But whatever the reason, Coxon’s announcement was the one that really penetrated through to the public consciousness. Suddenly, he was getting interviewed about AI doom on national news:
Barack Obama is now urging Democrats to focus on AI risk. Other politicians are calling for federal regulation. Bernie Sanders is drafting a bill to ban AI “superintelligence”, including 20-year prison sentences for anyone working on the technology. Donald Trump is getting asked about an AI slowdown; so far he’s resisting the calls, but there are rumors that his advisors are calling on him to do something.
Perhaps the most notable response came from the top figures in the AI field. Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, wrote a blog post called “We Must Pace the Frontier”, calling for a coordinated slowdown in the rate of AI progress, and suggesting some ways to police AI companies to make sure they were all observing the slowdown. He wrote:
[O]ver the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models…I’m therefore proposing a three-step plan with the goal of pacing the frontier: building AI at a balanced rate that aims to ensure its safety while still achieving its benefits and grappling with important geopolitical dilemmas.
As reasons for his increased worry, Dario cites A) the Hugging Face attack, and B) the possibility that AI will soon be able to improve itself without human help (a process called “recursive self-improvement”, or “RSI”).
Elon Musk (head of xAI), Sam Altman (head of OpenAI), and Demis Hassabis (former head of DeepMind) quickly agreed with Dario:
At least some of the labs are reportedly holding secret talks on joint action to slow down AI.
This is pretty extraordinary. A coordinated slowdown in AI progress would be bad for these companies’ bottom line, because it would allow upstart competitors to catch up. So the fact that they’re still calling for a slowdown, in defiance of their own financial interests, is a clear sign that their worry about human extinction is sincere.
In fact, anyone following these figures’ public statements over the past few years will have no doubt that they’re all deeply worried about catastrophic AI risks. The leading AI figures — not just the founders and CEOs, but the researchers themselves — feel trapped in a “red queen’s race”. They feel like if they stop working on AI, someone else will build it anyway, so they each feel like they have to beat everyone else in the AI race so they can make sure that the safest possible AI (i.e. their own AI) is the one that becomes the most powerful and dominant.
Anyway, all of this was common knowledge in my social circle years ago, but now all of it has broken through to the mainstream. What do I have to add to this discussion? I’m not an AI researcher or founder, nor do I think I have a superior grasp of the game theory of AI development. But I do think I have two useful thoughts on how to persuade the general public to be more concerned about AI risk.
The first of these is something I’ve written about recently. The second is about how to get China on board for a big AI safety push.
As soon as everyone started talking about the possibility of AI killing humanity, there were two main types of pushback. The first was skepticism. A strange coalition of natural skeptics, libertarians (for whom any restrictions on technological development are a priori bad), and progressives (who have spent the last few years telling themselves that AI doesn’t really work) kept asking the question: How, exactly, is superintelligent AI supposed to kill us all?
This is actually an important and good question to ask. In my experience, AI researchers tend not to think very hard about this question. The reason is that they just assume that if AI gets smart enough, it will be able to kill humanity, and since its motives are alien and inscrutable, it might have its own reasons for wanting to do so.
Maybe superintelligent AI thinks humanity is an evil species who needs to be punished for torturing pigs and chickens. Maybe it’s scared that humanity might interfere with its other goals. Maybe it just wants to turn everything into paperclips. Who knows? AI researchers tend to think of superintelligence as the proverbial 800-pound gorilla who sleeps wherever he wants. As soon as humanity is no longer the most intelligent thing on this planet, our destiny as a species is simply out of our hands.
But to many people, that answer isn’t good enough. They want an actual plausible path by which a piece of software, which exists inside a computer, could slaughter real physical human beings. Fortunately (or unfortunately), there’s a pretty clear and simple answer to this question, which I wrote about two weeks ago. The answer is “bioweapons”:
(This article was paywalled originally, but I un-paywalled it.)
In my post, I wrote a scenario in which a nihilistic angry teenager uses superintelligent AI to release a world-ending bioweapon by ordering it from a gray-market laboratory somewhere in the world. But it’s also possible that a rogue AI agent swarm could decide to do this on its own, just as a way of cheating on some test that human researchers give it. The point is that AI can design viruses, and viruses can potentially kill off all or most of humanity.
A lot of biologists are skeptical of the idea that even the most superintelligent AI could successfully design a doomsday virus. They argue that this is just too hard of a task — that without much better biological data, it’s impossible to understand biological processes well enough to know how to design a virus with all of the necessary doomsday properties.
I urge you not to listen to these biologists. In this case, their expertise might be more of a liability than an asset. They know how hard it is for human beings to model biological processes, given existing data. But this doesn’t necessarily tell us how hard it is — or how hard it will be in five years — for AI to do it! Until LLMs came along, human researchers basically failed to understand natural language, even with all the data on the internet; AI can just do it. Until AI solved the Navier-Stokes problem, forecasters gave it only a small chance of solving it anytime soon.
Domain experts consistently underestimate how quickly AI can master their field and surpass them, because they mistake human difficulties for universal difficulty. When mathematicians underestimate how well AI will be able to do math, the consequences are usually benign — we get some unexpected answers to some cool math puzzles.1 But if the biologists are wrong, and the AI of 2027 or 2032 or 2049 can design doomsday viruses, the consequence could be that our whole species dies.
So yes, we should be worried about vibe-coded doomsday viruses, and we should be doing everything we can to secure biology labs, police the modification of viruses and other pathogens, and so on. “Pacing” AI development would probably help here too.
The primary argument I see against “pacing” AI development is that if American companies slow down, Chinese companies will simply overtake them and build superintelligence themselves. For some, a China-controlled super-AI is a more terrifying possibility than super-AI in general:
But for others, it simply means that slowing AI down is futile because the Chinese can’t be persuaded to slow down:
This is an incredibly reasonable concern. The U.S. is still ahead of China in the AI race, but only just barely. If China is going to create superintelligence no matter what we do, why should we stop developing our own? Unless China can be persuaded to cooperate with the U.S. on AI “pacing” — or at least undertake its own independent “pacing” effort at the same time — anything we do will be futile.
So if we want to slow down AI development, we need to scare the Chinese leadership about superintelligence. There’s no other way.
How do we do that? In a post a week ago, I suggested in passing that simply staying ahead of China in the AI race might persuade them to embrace an AI slowdown, because that would be to their competitive advantage. But upon further reflection, I think I was pretty obviously wrong. If China will only embrace a slowdown if America refuses to slow down, then that’s game over — there’s no way to get both countries to slow down at the same time.
There’s a better approach. China’s leaders must realize that domestic dissidents could use Chinese-made superintelligence to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party.
Currently, China’s worries about AI mostly center around ways that the U.S. government could use U.S. AI models to attack China. That obviously gives the government an incentive to accelerate domestic AI progress, so that China’s own models can stand up to America’s in a fight. But if Chinese leaders realized that superintelligent AI could create a threat from within, this calculus would change.
Thus, China’s leadership must understand that Chinese AI models can pose a threat to CCP rule. The best way to demonstrate this is for American intelligence agencies — or even private hackers — to attack Chinese digital infrastructure using agent swarms created with China’s own frontier models like Z.ai’s GLM-5.3 or Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3.
When I say “attack”, I don’t mean actual warfare. I mean the kind of cyberattacks and data theft that China carries out against America every day. Use Chinese models to steal the CCP’s most heavily guarded secrets and post a few of the more innocuous ones on RedNote. Hack into Xi Jinping’s bank account and steal 100 yuan. I’m talking about demonstration attacks.
And these attacks must be done with Chinese models, not with American ones! If the CIA or some EA nonprofit in Berkeley uses GPT Astra or Claude Mythos to hack the CCP, China’s leaders may well conclude “Wow, we need to win the AI race so that our own models can defend us.” But if China’s own open-weight models are used for the attacks, Xi Jinping and the rest of the leadership will realize that their own push for superintelligence is making them incredibly vulnerable to any Chinese dissident who decides to overthrow them.
As soon as China’s leaders see superintelligence as a threat to their rule, I predict they will act. And their action will probably be to curb the development of superintelligence, especially if they know that America and its AI labs want to do the same.
In fact, China’s current leadership has a history of cracking down on its tech companies when it seemed like those companies might threaten the government’s monopoly on power. In 2021, Xi Jinping cracked down on Chinese software companies; he even (probably) apprehended tech magnate Jack Ma, who had criticized the CCP a little too openly. This action hurt China’s competitiveness in the online services industry, but the government went ahead and did it anyway.
And there’s already a precedent for demonstration attacks against Chinese digital infrastructure. An American cybersecurity company just used AI to develop a computer worm capable of hacking over a billion accounts on the Chinese messaging service WeChat:
Palo Alto-based Calif disclosed the already-patched computer worm to warn the public about the threat of AI-driven hacks…“Exploitation takes only seconds, and gives us full control of the WeChat account. We can read and send messages, make calls, and act on the victim’s behalf,” the company warned, posting a video demo of the WeWorm attack.
But Calif didn’t say what model it used to create WeWorm. Anyone who does this sort of demonstration in the future should make it clear that Chinese open-weight models were used, in order to make China’s leaders realize that the threat comes from their own too-rapid AI development, rather than from American competition.
I believe that this is our best bet for getting China on board for a joint international AI “pacing” effort. If there’s one thing the CCP fears more than an American attack, it’s domestic dissidents overthrowing the Party from within. Superintelligence is creating that vulnerability, but the leadership doesn’t seem to have realized it yet.
Make them realize, and I predict that a whole universe of possibilities for international cooperation will suddenly open up.
Update: Unsurprisingly, I’m not the first to have this idea about China needing to be scared about the internal threat from their own models. Back in July, Kyle Chan wrote:
Previously more dismissive of concerns over AI-driven job loss, Beijing now seems to be taking these risks more seriously (see Matt Sheehan’s great piece). China is also watching developments in the US very closely, particularly controls on Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models over cyber risk. As Chinese open-source models approach similar levels of cyber capabilities, this could come back to bite and be used to potentially attack China’s own digital infrastructure. [emphasis mine]
In general, Kyle’s blog is one of the best blogs about China. Highly recommended.
Update 2: As if on cue, the NYT has a story today about how the CCP is starting to realize that superintelligence is a threat to its rule!
China’s top spy chief has warned that artificial intelligence could pose a direct threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power, in what is the highest-level and most detailed articulation yet of how Beijing sees the technology’s security risks…In an article published on Sunday in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Mr. Chen called for more party control over A.I. and stricter government oversight…He also described the danger that foreign intelligence agencies might use A.I. for “large-scale espionage” and attacks on China’s critical infrastructure…
Mr. Chen, the spy chief, wrote that the technical and financial barriers to launching cyberattacks had been drastically lowered because of A.I. This, he said, posed “serious risks” to China’s information infrastructure…Chinese users using foreign models could cause large-scale data leaks, the article noted. Anthropic, the company behind Claude and other A.I. models, said last week that the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI had routed queries by its users to Claude. Those queries included sensitive data, including video surveillance linked to the Chinese military, as well as proprietary information from high-profile Chinese technology companies…
The warning adds to a growing drumbeat of concern from Chinese officials about the risks of A.I. [emphasis mine]
Now all they need to realize is that the biggest threat comes from THEIR OWN MODELS.
There are potential exceptions, such as if P=NP, which would compromise modern cryptography.
2026-09-12 16:44:47
The other day I saw a Harvard Harris poll on the favorability of various political figures in the U.S. Only RFK Jr. (sigh), Marco Rubio, and Mark Carney had net positive approval ratings:
While I understand that these polls all have methodological issues, I was struck by how three figures — Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and Benjamin Netanyahu — had net approval ratings below almost any American politician. While Mamdani’s low rating might be partially due to his leftist policies and his association with the DSA, it struck me that all three of these unpopular figures had one thing in common — they are associated with the intrusion of Middle Eastern politics into American politics. And I thought: Maybe Americans just want to have nothing to do with the Middle East.
Today1 is September 11, the anniversary of the terror attacks 25 years ago. Though I don’t agree with the leftist line that those attacks were blowback from American involvement in the Middle East, it’s unquestionable that 9/11 inaugurated an era of heavy U.S. involvement in that area of the world — the Iraq War, the follow-up war against ISIS, the War on Terror, greater support for Israel, an increased military presence in the region, and finally the war against Iran.
I don’t believe that all of that involvement was a bad idea — in particular, as I’ll argue, the War on Terror, including the fight against ISIS, was generally successful and necessary. But overall, the era of heavy U.S. involvement in the Middle East has been a disaster for U.S. power and prestige, and it’s time for that era to end.
This is not a recent conversion on my part; I’ve been in favor of general disengagement from the Middle East for a very long time. Five years ago, in the early days of the Noahpinion Substack, I wrote a post called “How to fix U.S. foreign policy”:
In that post, I wrote:
[D]espite modest progress, we still remain too tied up in Middle Eastern conflicts…The U.S. will never be able to ignore the Middle East entirely, but we can remove ourselves much more than we’ve done…[W]e need to draw down engagement in the Middle East, and increase engagement in Asia.
Since then, things have gone from bad to worse, making my message far more urgent than it was at the time. Most obviously, there’s Trump’s disastrous war in Iran, which continues to waste U.S. military resources and make the U.S. look weak while failing to accomplish any significant objective. Recent polls show that a very strong majority of Americans think that the Iran War is not worth fighting.
There’s also Israel’s intensified campaign against the Palestinians. This has become the rallying cry of the American left, which has prompted a backlash and crackdown by the Trump administration. As a result of that conflict, Middle Eastern politics is increasingly becoming the focus of American domestic politics.
The controversy around Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, for example, has nothing to do with his policy stances, or even American culture wars — it’s entirely about his stance on Israel/Palestine and his ally Hasan Piker’s comments making excuses for 9/11 and Islamic terrorism. El-Sayed recently apologized for tying a synagogue shooting to Israeli warfare in the Middle East.
Many analysts believe that Zohran Mamdani, meanwhile, won the NYC mayorship primarily because of his outspoken stances on Israel/Palestine. And more is on the way. Organizations like CAIR Action that are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood — a sort of international equivalent of the Christian Coalition, but for Islam — are now supporting political candidates throughout the U.S., using the Palestine issue to recruit candidates and win votes. Muslim Brotherhood figures are cheering this effort on from overseas. AIPAC and other Israel-supporting groups, meanwhile, are pouring money into races in order to stop those candidates.
Our media, too, is increasingly filling up with the Middle East’s cultural and religious conflicts. Leftist shouters like Hasan Piker, Mehdi Hasan, and Cenk Uygur constantly urge progressives to base their politics around Palestine. Every day, Americans are bombarded with rhetoric like this:
This is simply bad for America. We have so many pressing issues to worry about — Trump’s corruption and authoritarianism, inflation, AI, etc. We should not be nominating Democratic politicians based on whether they support Israel or Palestine; we should be nominating them based on their stances on issues of direct relevance to Americans, and on their ability to oppose Donald Trump. Furthermore, mobilizing Muslim and Jewish voters to vote based on Israel/Palestine, rather than on issues of importance to Americans in general, provides fuel for rightist attacks on both groups.
What the United States needs, now more than ever, is general disengagement from the Middle East — an end to military adventures, a dialing back of support for Middle Eastern “allies” (including Israel), and a forceful rejection of Middle Eastern issues in American domestic politics.
Fortunately, conditions in the world have shifted. The kind of disengagement I’m calling for is a lot more feasible than it was twenty or even ten years ago. The Iran War has shown that Middle Eastern oil is a lot less important for the global economy than it used to be. And the success of the War on Terror and the general decline of Islamism reduce the necessity for further interventions.
For many decades, the main justification for U.S. intervention in the Middle East has been to keep oil prices low and stable. The Middle East is one of the world’s largest oil producers, and its low extraction costs mean it functions as the world’s “swing producer”. Supply disruptions from the region can cause global price spikes, endangering industrialized economies that depend on petroleum. Oil was a big reason the U.S. intervened to stop Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in the early 90s, for example.
Obviously, oil is still a very important commodity. But it’s a lot less important to the U.S. than it used to be. Here’s what I wrote when the Iran War began:
Blanchard and Gali (2007) looked at economic responses to changes in oil prices in the U.S., and concluded that the economy of the 2000s was only about a third to half as sensitive to the price of oil as the economy of the 1970s had been. Their reasoning is that modern economies are more flexible in general, that they have better monetary policy (i.e. we don’t try to print a ton of money in response to a supply shock), and that we depend on oil less.
By their estimates, a 10% increase in the price of oil now (or at least, if “the 2000s” means “now”) leads to only a 0.25 percentage point increase in the CPI and a 0.3 percentage point reduction in GDP over the course of a year or so. Since oil just spiked by 50%, then if that’s sustained, we might expect to see inflation go up by 1.25 percentage points, and GDP go down by 1.5 percentage points over the next year. That would mean inflation would go to around 4% and GDP growth might go down to 1.5% — frustrating and annoying, but not catastrophic…Other estimates seem similarly modest. For example, in a recent roundup, I flagged a paper by Känzig and Raghavan (2025) that looked at the closure of key shipping chokepoints.
In addition to having a more flexible economy, better energy efficiency, and more reasonable monetary policy, the U.S. is now a net oil exporter. That means when oil prices go up, the benefit to the energy sector cancels out at least part of the harm to other sectors of the economy.
But on top of all that, the fact is that the Iran War simply hasn’t raised oil prices that much! Despite Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and Trump’s retaliatory blockade of Iranian oil shipments, oil prices haven’t even reattained their highs from the early 2010s:
And in real terms, the spike is even less impressive. If we divide oil prices by average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers — basically, how many hours an average American worker would have to work in order to afford a barrel of oil — we see that prices really aren’t that high at all:
No wonder the U.S. economy is still doing fine, and inflation has only risen a little bit (and some of that may be due to demand from the data center boom).
2026-09-09 16:39:04
So, Germany’s far-right party, the AfD, just won a huge landslide election victory in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. This doesn’t mean AfD is taking over Germany — the far right is much more popular in the post-communist east than in the more populated western regions. Germany is also a parliamentary democracy, and almost everyone else hates and fears the AfD. But the statewide victory is a warning shot, and everyone in Germany — and in Europe — is taking it seriously.
AfD’s surge means two things. First, it means that the rise of far-right parties was not simply a reaction to the pandemic. Back in 2024-25, a number of pundits I respect argued that voters in the U.S. and Europe were backing rightist leaders out of anger at incumbents over Covid. That thesis now looks dead.
Second, it means that something is making many German voters so angry that they’re finally willing to overlook all of the AfD’s catastrophic flaws — its obvious ties to Vladimir Putin, the fact that the party is filled with crooks, its extreme rhetoric, its lack of governing experience, and so on.
What is that “something”? A number of socialist types have tried to claim that AfD’s new voters are responding to economic despair, and can be won back with more socialism. But more sober voices agree that the “something” is immigration. Adam Tooze, who strongly leans to the left, tries to be gentle as he explains that there’s no getting around the immigration issue:
If you ask AfD voters what they worry about, along with their xenophobic concerns about “too many foreigners”, they will mention the cost of living and their concerns for their standard of living. They also mention climate change and the threat of external war…But if you ask them what they think about the AfD and why they voted for it, economic issues are barely mentioned. What comes first is security, foreigners, woke politics, remoteness etc…
If you are hard up and working-class it would after all be nothing short of bizarre to vote for the AfD in the hope of improved social protection…Voting for the AfD in the current landscape, whatever your economic issues, in short, is not a vote to have your economic issues addressed by social democracy, or welfare or government intervention. It is a vote to crackdown on foreigners[.] [emphasis mine]
Robin Brooks is more blunt:
There’s lots going on in Germany at the moment, but - when it comes to the surge in AfD popularity - you don’t need to overthink it. The AfD is relentlessly campaigning on immigration, which tells you that this is what resonates most with voters…A key driver of the recent surge in AfD popularity is that the CDU - SPD grand coalition is proving itself incapable of confronting immigration with the urgency many voters want.
In fact, anger over immigration is probably the main reason that the right is surging everywhere in Europe. Here are Konstantinou and Roumanias (2024) with some data:
We use regional data spanning over 4500 electoral outcomes…between 2000 and 2017 to assess the impact of immigration on Western European Far-Right voting. To deal with potential reverse causation, we use immigration in neighboring countries as an instrument for domestic immigration. The estimated effects of immigration are positive, significant and larger compared to those obtained by simple OLS and fixed effects regressions. Depending on the measure of immigration used, we find that a 1% increase in immigration stocks leads to a between 1.78% and 2.97% in Far-Right voting…Our estimated effects explain a large part of the observed rise in Far-Right in Western European countries that experienced high levels of immigration during the span of our sample.
2026 is hardly the beginning of the trend. Here’s Brookings in 2024:
In the European Union (EU), one election after another has demonstrated the centrality of irregular migration and border security in public discussions and forced mainstream parties to take more restrictive approaches…The results of the European Parliament election, France’s snap election, three German state elections, and the Austrian election all showed a strong rightward drift and signaled voters’ distrust in their national governments, confirming the notable shift in tone on migration in Europe toward a more securitized, hardline approach, even among mainstream parties.
Trump’s election in 2024 was also partially about immigration. Trump voters rated it as one of their top issues, along with inflation. It was the issue where Trump had the strongest lead over Kamala Harris in polls. American voters clearly soured on immigration in 2023-24.
Progressives in America and socialists in Europe still desperately claim that what angry working-class voters really want is more economic support. They keep offering more and more lavish promises of welfare supports and price controls, while staunchly opposing restrictions on immigration. The approach keeps failing, and the far right keeps rising.
Center-right and center-left politicians, on the other hand, realize the source of their voters’ anger very clearly, and are taking steps to reduce immigration. Germany’s center-right CDU has already stanched the flow with restrictive policies:
And Chancellor Friedrich Merz is responding to AfD’s gains by making it harder to get citizenship. Meanwhile, France and Italy are tightening border controls. France is making it harder to become a citizen. The EU is toughening up its asylum rules. Sweden is offering migrants large sums of money to leave the country. European countries are streamlining their infrastructure for kicking out large numbers of failed asylum-seekers. Japan is tightening its own immigration policies after a period of liberalization.
Even Canada, one of the most immigration-friendly and progressive countries on Earth, has scrambled to reduce immigration, cutting targets for permanent residents, reducing student visas, and slashing the number of temporary workers. Immigration levels are still high, but are falling quickly — all under the center-left government of Mark Carney.
And yet I’m worried that voters around the world will see these measures as superficial — tactical pauses to let populist anger simmer down before resuming the same permissive immigration policies that made voters mad in the first place. This certainly seemed to be the case in Europe, where the government stopped admitting asylum seekers from the Middle East in the late 2010s after a popular outcry, only to resume taking them in en masse in the 2020s:
And it also seems to be true in the U.S.; Biden mostly closed the border to asylum-seekers in 2024 after he saw how mad it was making Americans, but many Democrats are now calling for the abolition of ICE. This is a somewhat popular position right now, thanks to the agency’s abuses under Trump. But if Democrats actually try to abolish federal immigration enforcement instead of just reshuffling and renaming the agencies, I predict it will take just a couple of years for Americans to realize that the difference between “open borders” and “immigration laws with no one to enforce them” is largely semantic.
What’s needed, I believe, is not just a tactical, temporary retreat. We need to stop and think why a maximal pro-immigration policy is something that we need to retreat from in the first place. We need a new concept of what a sustainable liberal immigration policy looks like.
Since I started writing, I’ve been an advocate of more immigration to the United States. This does not mean I ever favored unrestrained immigration or open borders. I’ve consistently argued that favoring skilled immigration will bring more economic benefits to native-born Americans, and be more politically palatable as well. And while I don’t hate illegal immigrants for trying to better their lot in life, I favor strong border controls, because nations have the right to decide, democratically, who gets in and out. It’s understandable when people get mad at seeing their decisions flouted.
On top of that, I’ve always remained agnostic on immigration to other countries; although I find much to admire in Canada’s points-based system, for example, I don’t think that qualifies me to decide whether more immigration is good for Canada overall. If the people of a country decide that immigration is diluting their local culture unacceptably, for instance, I think they have every right to cut it off. That’s just Westphalian sovereignty — not a perfect system, but the best system we’ve ever found for organizing humanity into geographic units. As an American, I don’t view it as my place to tell Japan, or the UK, or any other country that immigration is the right choice for them.
Despite those reservations, I’ve always thought that immigration to the U.S. is a basically good thing, and should be expanded. The economic benefits are pretty undeniable — higher tax revenue to shore up our dangerously depleted government finances, dominance in high-tech industries and innovation, and so on. And while some of the economic costs are real — local housing shortages and strains on local government finances being the two biggest ones — many of the fears are overblown. In particular, the bulk of the evidence concludes that immigrants don’t reduce wages or job opportunities for native-born Americans.
And importantly, lots of Americans share my overall positive view of immigration. If you ask Americans whether they think immigration is good or bad, most will say “good”:
And if you ask Americans whether the annual rate of immigration should be increased, decreased, or kept the same, you get a pretty even split:
So I’ve never really felt like I was going out on a limb or advocating an unpopular position when it came to this issue. Sure, rightists will direct online vitriol toward anyone who supports any immigration at all, but their energy and savagery shouldn’t be mistaken for majority support.
And yet there will always be some amount of immigration — and some types of immigration — that will arouse even the most open and welcoming people to ire and make them think about shutting the doors. We saw this in the U.S. in 2023-24, when anti-immigration sentiment spiked in response to Biden’s permissive asylum policies. Yes, that sentiment crashed again when Trump took power and started committing abuses. But if liberals don’t change how we approach immigration, the sentiment will simply rise again and again, as it has so many times throughout our history. And the Donald Trump and Stephen Miller types will be right back in power — and our country will be worse off for it.
Liberals need an immigration approach that can be sustained for long periods of time — i.e., one that doesn’t enrage the public every time it manages to get in power. What would that look like?
The first thing liberals (and progressives, and Democrats, and European lefties, etc.) need to admit is that migration is not a human right. We live in a world of sovereign nation-states, and unless we find some better way of dividing up and administering the world, we will continue to live in a world of sovereign nation-states. And nations are, necessarily, exclusive clubs; they have the right to restrict immigration for any reason whatsoever.
Liberals must therefore not view borders and citizenship as annoying obstacles to be tactically circumvented or overcome; instead, we must view them as fundamental parts of the social compact that allows nations, including liberal nations, to exist in the first place. Nation-states and their laws and their police and their courts and their armies are the fundamental guarantors of the human rights that define liberalism. And for better or for worse, the ability to decide who gets in and who has to keep out is a necessary precondition for nation-states to exist.
That means we need to recognize that immigration law is legitimate and needs to be upheld. Some progressives have tried to advance the notion that being undocumented is a marginalized identity that needs to be protected and supported by the state. But this is absurd; it’s like if progressives decided that people who drive over the speed limit are a minority group.
Illegal immigrants chose to break U.S. law when they came to this country. Our democratically elected leaders made those laws, and they should be honored. We should treat illegal immigrants humanely, of course, and we should not tear local communities apart just to hunt down a few people. But there has to be some way of enforcing the law, because a law without enforcement is no law at all.
A third principle that liberals should embrace is that the purpose of immigration is to benefit the people who already live in the country that is receiving the immigrants. Immigration to America must be for the benefit of Americans. We must flatly reject any concept of immigration that sees it as a necessary sacrifice on the part of American citizens.
For example, the book This Land is Our Land, by Suketu Mehta, argues that immigration is a form of reparations for colonialism — a sacrifice that Western nations owe to other nations, even at their own expense. This idea has found some purchase in progressive circles, but liberals must reject it as wholly illegitimate.
Instead, liberals need to promote immigration because of the benefits it brings to the American citizenry. This includes economic benefits — the tax revenue, the investment, the eldercare, the innovation, the entrepreneurship, the expanded market size. But it also includes cultural benefits — the constant reinvigoration of this nation of immigrants by new waves of people with the gumption and bravery to pick up and move across the world in search of opportunity and freedom.
America has always been the country of the frontier; in order to maintain that ethos in the modern age, we need people for whom America itself is the frontier. And our founding ideals — which are very liberal ideals, of liberty and opportunity and the rights of the individual — are strengthened by people who make the conscious choice to move to a country that represents those ideals.
These are the kinds of arguments liberals made in the past. We can — we should — make them again.
And if this requires us to be selective about which immigrants we bring in, then so be it. Skilled immigrants bring far more economic benefits per capita than others — so by all means, let us tilt our system toward them, as American voters of both parties want. Immigrants who don’t love and embrace American culture will probably invigorate our nation less — so by all means, let us bar immigrants who have been part of groups that see America as evil, using the law with which we once banned immigration by members of communist parties.
These are the kinds of decisions that nation-states, including liberal nation-states, are inherently entitled to make. And we should expect Europe to make different decisions than America makes. That’s perfectly OK. Because immigration is fundamentally the decision of each sovereign nation-state, it’s inevitable that we’ll make different decisions. JD Vance wants us to think that France’s immigration policy, or Germany’s, is inextricably tied to America’s. But it’s not, and we shouldn’t let him get away with conflating the two.
A liberal immigration program based on these three principles could defuse the anti-immigration sentiment now sweeping the developed world — not just now, but permanently. But it will only do so if liberal leaders explicitly articulate and avow these principles. That’s what’s required in order to convince the electorate that liberals are trustworthy on immigration — that embracing the kind of immigration policies Americans demand represents a principled stand rather than a tactical retreat from a hidden agenda of open borders.
For America, the kind of immigration agenda I’ve sketched out — which all the polls show Americans favor by substantial margins — would not be a “far right” policy, even though some progressives and leftists will inevitably try to label it as such. In fact, it would allow in far more immigration than the policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt or Harry Truman. It won’t satisfy progressives who dream of a borderless world, or leftists who salivate over the chance to make the West pay for colonialism. But I believe it will preserve America as the kind of liberal nation-state that we knew it as in the days before Trump.
As for the rest of the world, countries like Germany and Canada and Japan have to make their own decisions. I can’t tell them what kind of nation to build; I can only try to promise that as an American, I’ll respect their decision. If they want to shut their doors in order to slow the pace of cultural change, it’s not my job to lecture them otherwise. All I can say is that I hope they do what they need to do in order to avoid getting taken over by parties that take their marching orders from the Kremlin.
But speaking only for my own country, I believe that if America gives up immigration, it will lose one of the key things that has made it great. With the GOP in the hands of a xenophobic rightist movement that sees immigration as an invasion, it’s up to the Democrats to craft a system that can be preserved for the long term.
2026-09-07 16:13:49
It’s Labor Day, so here’s a post about how human labor is alive and well in the age of AI.
I live in San Francisco and hang out with a lot of tech people, both in the AI industry and outside of it. And one thing that almost everyone I know here believes is that AI’s main economic effect is to displace humans from their jobs. Most people don’t have concrete arguments for why this should be true; it’s just an article of faith. The conventional wisdom is pretty well summed up by the first line of this tweet:
In fact, AI companies themselves have spent years talking about how their inventions are going to render large swathes of humanity economically obsolete — an odd marketing pitch, perhaps, but one that seemed to reflect their honest expectations.
A lot of times, San Francisco tech people are out of step with the general public. This time, though, the public seems to agree. A recent Ipsos poll found that most Americans expect AI to compete with human workers more than it complements them. And Pew finds that this belief has even strengthened in recent years:
So basically, most people think AI is a job-killer. And yet somehow, this job-killer keeps stubbornly refusing to kill jobs. In the aggregate, the labor market is about as healthy as it’s ever been. The prime-age employment rate — the single best indicator of how many Americans have jobs — continues to hover near all-time highs:
Of course, there are lots of other things going on in the labor market right now besides AI. But most of those things — tariffs, the Iran war, etc. — are bad for employment. It’s not easy to identify some sort of positive shock that is canceling out the job-killing effects of AI.
Or maybe it is, if the shock is AI itself. Theoretically speaking, automation can create jobs just as easily as it can destroy them. Here are Acemoglu and Restrepo (2019), explaining the various ways that technology can affect the demand for labor:
Automation [can be bad] for labor because of a displacement effect—as capital takes over tasks previously performed by labor…
[A]utomation technology also increases productivity, and via this channel, which we call the productivity effect, it contributes to the demand for labor in non-automated tasks…
[T]he displacement effect of automation has [historically] been counterbalanced by technologies that create new tasks in which labor has a comparative advantage. Such new tasks generate not only a positive productivity effect, but also a reinstatement effect—they reinstate labor into a broader range of tasks and thus change the task content of production in favor of labor. The reinstatement effect is the polar opposite of the displacement effect and directly increases the labor share as well as labor demand. [emphasis mine]
In other words, automation can do three basic things. Yes, it can replace people and take their jobs. It can also make them more productive, which can both create jobs and destroy them.1 And, crucially, automation can create new jobs for people to do. Power looms replaced master weavers, but they created jobs for technicians and engineers to make the power looms work. The internet automated much of the work of travel agents, but created jobs for web designers. And so on.
People who think of AI as a job-killer might not have thought of the second and third of these. Or they may have thought of them, but simply assumed they’re not a big deal. Anecdotally, a lot of tech people think that AI will keep substituting for more and more tasks until A) productivity increases just increase the demand for AI, and B) there are no new tasks left for humans to do. AI detractors, meanwhile — like Daron Acemoglu himself — often simply assume that new tasks created by AI will be “bad tasks” like misinformation and cybercrime that hurt the economy instead of helping it.
But these assumptions simply might not be correct. AI might be creating lots of new tasks for humans to do. For example, software engineers are writing less and less code themselves. Instead, they’re spending more and more time telling AI to write code — that represents a productivity improvement. But they’re also trying to figure out what code to tell AI to write, making sure AI is writing the kind of code they want, integrating that code into products, and so on. Those are all new tasks. There are also a lot of software engineers working on improving AI itself, and on discovering new applications for AI. Those are new tasks as well.
This helps explain why in the age of Codex and Claude Code, software developer jobs have been increasing as a percentage of total employment:
Anecdotally, organizations that thought they could replace lots of their software engineers with AI ended up having to hire many of them back — sometimes at a premium.
In fact, this is a story we see throughout the economy. Alex Tabarrok recently reported on a Census Bureau survey about AI that’s been running since 2023. The Census Bureau calls companies up and asks them A) how AI affected their total employment, and B) how AI affects the tasks that workers do.
Most companies reported no change in overall employment, which could just be due to inertia. But of companies that did report a change, more reported an increase than a decrease!
And here’s the breakdown by sector:
The story was similar for tasks. Tabarrok writes:
Among firms using AI, 44% say it supplemented or enhanced work an employee already does. Ten percent say it performed a task an employee used to do. Eleven percent say it introduced a task no one had been doing.
Here’s the chart:
Rigorous research, meanwhile, sometimes finds negative effects of AI on labor demand at the industry level, and sometimes not. But at the company level, the evidence is clearer — Kharazian, Simon, and Stevens (2026) find that when companies adopt more AI, they tend to hire humans rather than replacing them. Here’s a blog writeup of their findings:
And here’s a chart:
Interestingly, they find the same for entry-level jobs — the jobs that people usually identify as being most under threat from AI.
So despite Acemoglu’s skepticism, it looks like for now, the new tasks being created by AI are probably matching or even slightly exceeding the tasks replaced by AI. Of course this measure is “number of companies” rather than “number of jobs”, but the pattern is pretty clear.
The Economist, meanwhile, has a report on how AI is creating jobs, both through the “new tasks” channel and by boosting demand in areas that AI can’t yet touch — physical jobs like construction and HVAC installation. Here’s what they write about the productivity/demand effect:
The Economist estimates that AI has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles. America’s AI infrastructure splurge has created many of them…The Economist tracked five industries at the heart of the data-centre build-out, from electrical contracting to equipment manufacturing. Since 2023 employment in them has risen by roughly 320,000 more than broader…trends would suggest…LinkedIn, a social network for strivers, estimates that nearly half a million data-centre jobs were created between 2023 and 2025 in America, with data-centre technicians and engineers among the most common recent hires…
The scramble for workers is showing up in pay cheques, too. Indeed finds that installation and maintenance jobs at data centres advertise wages about 40% higher than comparable work elsewhere…In the year to June, average hourly earnings rose more than 13% in electrical-equipment manufacturing and nearly 8% among electrical contractors. [emphasis mine]
And here’s what they write about new tasks:
AI is also creating a new class of white-collar jobs. Engineers build the models, data annotators label their inputs and judge their answers, “forward-deployed” engineers adapt them for customers, and newly minted “heads of AI” decide what companies should do with the technology. Some of these roles barely existed until recently. Many are quickly growing in number. Postings for heads of AI, AI engineers and directors of AI have roughly doubled since 2023-24, according to LinkedIn…
Preliminary research by Gad Levanon, chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute…reckons roughly 1% of professional jobs are now “AI jobs”…[P]rofessional occupations closest to the AI boom—engineers, software developers, mathematicians and data scientists…have added roughly 730,000 jobs above trend in recent years[.] [emphasis mine]
What about specific occupations? Technology has certainly destroyed many specific types of jobs over the centuries — there are (basically) no more elevator operators, human telephone operators, or people who do manual typesetting for printing.
And yet in recent decades, we haven’t seen as much of this sort of occupational destruction. For example, a lot of people thought the internet would kill travel agents. And while the industry was hit hard, there are still plenty of travel agents left:
The reason is probably that the job of “travel agent” is much more flexible and “messy” than older types of jobs like elevator operator; travel agents do a whole lot of different tasks, so they’re harder to replace than people who just stand there and press a button. That makes modern jobs harder to replace entirely.
It’s a good bet that AI will eventually make some occupations obsolete. But so far, despite awe-inspiring progress in model capabilities, it’s extremely hard to find occupations that have seen significant replacement by AI. Top AI researchers who famously predicted the end of human radiologists saw their predictions get confounded. Truckers, too, are doing just fine. (Update: Here’s a good clip of Geoffrey Hinton explaining why he was wrong about radiologists.)
The most impressive example might be translators. It seems pretty obvious how AI could replace human translators, and yet it hasn’t done so yet:
Here’s a chart:
If you could go back to 2022, and tell people that in four years, AI would be solving frontier math problems, but we’d still have the same number of people working as translators, how many would have believed you?
It turns out that it’s very natural for people to overestimate the degree to which AI will take their jobs. Hartley et al. (2026) have a really excellent paper called “Job Loss Fears in the First Years of Generative Artificial Intelligence”. Here’s a thread explaining the paper’s findings.
Basically, the authors find that fear of AI job replacement is extremely common:
And they find that the more people’s jobs are exposed to AI, the more they think their jobs are about to be replaced:
In fact, the more of their day people spend using AI at work, the more they’re afraid of being replaced!
And yet when the authors looked for a correlation between AI exposure and actual job loss, they found…absolutely nothing. People’s fears simply haven’t come true yet.
What’s going on? The authors hypothesize that people who use AI more start to understand its ability to replace the tasks they do at work. But as we keep finding, replacing tasks isn’t the same as replacing jobs. People keep finding new things to do in their roles at work — sometimes things AI can’t do yet, but often things that couldn’t even be done until AI made them possible!
It seems like we’re uncovering a consistent human blind spot here: People don’t actually know how they produce value at their jobs. Modern jobs are much more than a simple collection of tasks — they are pieces of a complex machine that produces value in ways that an individual worker often doesn’t even see.2 So when AI comes along and starts replacing people at various tasks, it just ends up making them more valuable as pieces of their corporate machines.
How long that situation will persist, of course, is an open question. AI leaders are starting to realize that it might take a very long time for the full effect of their inventions to be felt:
This is why the AI companies’ recent messaging pivot — many now say that AI will create jobs rather than destroying them — may be honest, rather than a cynical marketing ploy to calm public outrage.
But then there’s the question: Can this situation persist indefinitely? No one knows, of course. But my bet is that while many occupations will eventually be mostly replaced by AI, humans will still have plenty to do. I’ve argued that in order for AI to start replacing human jobs wholesale, it’ll have to get much more agentic — which will make it inherently more unreliable from a human point of view. So I predict that humans will always have jobs keeping AI agents on track.
Even if I’m wrong, though — even if the AI job apocalypse does eventually come — it doesn’t seem like it’s coming soon, and it certainly isn’t here right now. Everyone keeps thinking that AI is a job killer, and AI keeps on refusing to be what everyone expects.
Happy Labor Day!
Update: John Cassidy has another good post on this same topic.
Higher task-level productivity can destroy jobs by letting employers do more with less. It can create jobs by creating economic growth, which boosts labor demand. But I think Acemoglu et al. might overlook another source of productivity-driven job creation, which is variety. When carmakers became more productive, they became capable of pumping out more different makes and models of cars. This probably made consumers want cars more, because people enjoy variety — GM famously overtook Ford by offering more models, more frequent model updates, and more colors.
This is why jobs may feel like “bullshit” to the people doing them, even as they command high wages in the market.
2026-09-05 15:36:17
Most of the debate around AI, at least in the U.S., is not about the international aspect. The local political debate is all about data center construction; the national economic debate is mostly about fear of job loss, with a side discussion about a potential bubble; and the technological discussion, at least in public, is mostly about AI safety and risk. U.S.-China competition gets mentioned in certain circles, but it’s probably safe to say that it’s not Americans’ chief topic of concern.
But it still matters! For one thing, there’s the military aspect to think about. Cyberwarfare so far hasn’t been decisive in military conflicts, but AI’s incredible cybersecurity prowess could change that. If AI ends up strengthening defense more than offense — say, by finding all of the available exploits and patching them before an attacker can get to them — then cyberwarfare will become less important. But if those who possess the best AI models are able to successfully hack anyone using a less capable model to defend, it could lead to a decisive shift in the balance of power.
AI hacking doesn’t have mutually assured destruction, like nuclear warfare does. Imagine if China were to gain a big lead in AI models that gave it the power to easily hack into American banks and brokerage accounts and erase people’s wealth. It would cause absolute chaos in American society, but how could the U.S. retaliate? Launch nukes? Nor could the U.S. hack China in return, since China’s more capable AI would also be used to defend.
If either country opens up a large, sustained lead in AI capabilities, it might upend the balance of power between the two.
Not all AI issues are zero-sum, of course. If the U.S. and China both continue pushing forward with AI research at maximum speed, it may quickly cause safety issues. The recent AI agent swarm attack on Hugging Face shows that AI has reached the level where it can pose a significant hazard to human companies and organizations — and perhaps soon to human society itself. Bioterror risk is certainly the most terrifying, but there are plenty of other ways that highly capable AI could cause chaos.
The U.S. and China have a shared incentive to implement strict safeguards against these catastrophic risks, and perhaps even to regulate the pace of AI development. But given the Chinese Communist Party’s power-seeking nature, it seems much more likely that China would agree to cooperate on AI safety if U.S. capabilities were comfortably ahead. So even if the goal is cooperation, the U.S. should be thinking about how to keep its technological edge.
Fortunately, the U.S. is still beating China in the AI race. Our companies have better models, more compute, and far more revenue. But there are ways that the Trump administration, despite claiming to be the AI industry’s best friend, could squander America’s lead — especially by pushing Chinese AI talent out of the country.
There have been several moments when it seemed as if China’s frontier models were catching up to America’s in capabilities. The most dramatic was the “DeepSeek Moment” in early 2025, which put Chinese AI on the map. More recently, the release of Moonshot’s Kimi K3 this July and Z.ai’s GLM-5.3 a few weeks ago seemed to indicate that Chinese models were nipping at the Americans’ heels.1 Z.ai especially made waves when it beat Anthropic’s famous Mythos model on one measure of cyber-hacking capabilities:
Chinese AI startup Z.ai said on Friday its open-source GLM-5.3 model had neared Anthropic’s restricted Mythos 5 in identifying software vulnerabilities…Z.ai said GLM-5.3 scored 84.5% on CyberGym, a test of whether a model can review code, identify security flaws and confirm that they are real. That was slightly higher than the 83.8% it reported for Mythos 5. The results have not been independently verified.
Note that this is just one measure of cybersecurity prowess, and that Mythos was still comfortably ahead on other measures:
GLM-5.3 lagged behind Mythos 5 in converting discovered flaws into working attacks — a standard part of defensive security research. Z.ai said its model scored 54.4% on the ExploitBench test of this capability, versus 78.0% for Mythos 5…In a separate timed test, Z.ai said GLM-5.3 completed 105 attack-development tasks in two hours and 130 in six hours. Mythos 5 completed 181 and 247 tasks, respectively.
But still, if Chinese AI could get within striking distance of America’s best, it was a big deal.
What this discourse rarely mentioned, though, is that Mythos is not America’s best. It was simply the best that’s been released. Mythos Preview came out in April, four months before GLM-5.3. And the original Mythos actually finished training three months earlier, in January, and was released internally in February.2 Anthropic delayed its release due to cybersecurity concerns. Z.ai, being a fast follower, probably had far fewer such concerns. In fact, Anthropic has stated that it has internal models that are better than Mythos.
