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.
2026-09-03 17:55:22
Stripe Press was kind enough to send me several books it had published, and one of these was J. Storrs Hall’s Where Is My Flying Car?. I had been meaning to read this book for a while, especially after Tyler Cowen recommended it and Jason Crawford gave it a glowing review, so I was glad Stripe gave me a copy. I promptly stuck it on my shelf, paid for the audiobook, and listened to it while walking around San Francisco. That’s called ordinary abundance, folks!
In 2011, Peter Thiel famously said: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” When I first saw that quote, I chuckled, because for my entire life, we’ve had flying buses. And again and again, as I sit on a flying bus and marvel at the thrill of takeoff, and reflect on how amazing it is that man has conquered the air, I look around and see my fellow passengers with their window shades drawn, their noses buried in a book or staring at a phone.
If we had flying cars, we’d enjoy the thrill for a few weeks, and then we’d be back to tweeting on our phones and wondering when the trip would be over.
I’ve noticed a loose collection of beliefs and attitudes that I’ve decided to call “engineerism”, because I see it most often among engineers. I coined the term when I was in college, when I noticed that the engineering majors in my physics classes tended to think differently about the world than the physics majors like myself did. Later, I recognized “engineerism” in various sci-fi novels — Lucifer’s Hammer and Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Peace War by Vernor Vinge, and so on.1
When I say “engineerism”, I am not talking about Friedrich Hayek’s “engineering mentality” — the belief that society can be designed and optimized like a machine.2 Nor am I referring to Evgeny Morozov’s “technological solutionism”, which is the idea that social problems can be fixed with technology. If I had to define what I call “engineerism” in succinct, simple terms, it would be something like: “The idea that if a technology can be built, we ought to build it.” Simply put, engineers like to engineer things, and they become disgruntled when society does not give them the resources to do this.
Of course, engineerism is not quite so simple in the real world. It involves a lot of thinking habits that come in handy in engineering — linear approximation, back-of-the-envelope calculations, and so on. And in America, it also involves a set of beliefs that have sort of accreted over the years — for example, a belief in the importance of nuclear power.
I’ve had the concept of engineerism kicking around in my mind for many years, but in Where Is My Flying Car? I have found its perfect encapsulation — you might even say its Bible. Nowhere are both the value and the limitations of engineerism more perfectly on display than in this book.
Where Is My Flying Car? occupies an interesting middle space between genres. Futurism is about predicting the future. Science fiction is about (among other things) speculating on possible futures. And history of technology explains the past. Where Is My Flying Car? has bits of all three of these, but fundamentally it’s a book of retrofuturism — it’s about the technologies we thought we would get but didn’t, and why we didn’t, and how we could get them now.
The main technology Hall talks about is, unsurprisingly, flying cars. The other three are cold fusion, nanotechnology (Hall’s own area of research), and nuclear (fission) power. Hall argues that a combination of overregulation, scientific groupthink, bad funding mechanisms, and cultural aversion prevented us from achieving all four of these.
Wait…cold fusion? Is that even real?? Well, not as far as we know, no. In 1989, two top chemists reported that they had managed to get much more heat out of a nuclear experiment than chemistry would be able to produce. The chemists thought that they had discovered a way to produce nuclear fusion without injecting huge amounts of energy — smashing ions together at insanely high speed, blasting them with a laser, etc. If it worked, cold fusion would be an incredible energy source.
So naturally, a lot of people tried to follow up on cold fusion. A wave of initial replication efforts mostly failed (though some people claimed to find the effect). But there have been plenty more efforts, including:
A Japanese government project in the 1990s, with funding of around $20 million
A project by Toyota in the 1990s, with around $18 million in funding
A project by the Electric Power Research Institute in the 2000s, with around $10 million in funding
A project by Google in the 2010s, with $10 million of funding
None of these efforts have reliably reproduced the effect that the two chemists claimed in 1989. A few of the researchers found some strange anomalies and possible new physical effects, but nothing even remotely similar to the kind of energy source that cold fusion would represent — and no consistent evidence that fusion is causing the occasional anomalies.3 Some other scientists have found ways to enhance fusion using chemical techniques vaguely reminiscent of the methods in the 1989 experiments, but nothing remotely close to the scale of what “cold fusion” would require. There’s interesting nuclear physics going on in solid-state chemistry, but the original burst of excitement around the 1989 experiment looks like it was misplaced.
That’s not the way Hall tells it, though. He claims that cold fusion is a promising area of research, and that what he terms the “Machiavelli Effect” — basically, vested interests trying to shut down research that would supersede their own research programs — strangled the promising field of cold fusion in its cradle by stigmatizing it and depriving it of funding.
That story just doesn’t pass the smell test. Multiple optimistic, good-faith research efforts, from various countries, from both the public and private sectors, have each thrown tens of millions of dollars at the idea, despite repeated lack of success. That is just not what a marginalized area of science looks like. Yes, lots of people regarded (and regard) the idea of cold fusion as kooky, but plenty of others didn’t and don’t — including the people who headed the many multimillion-dollar research efforts.
Hall knew about all of those efforts, and their outcomes, when he published the 2021 version of his book. But although he mentions some of them, he continues to insist that cold fusion research was mainly stifled by malign social influences. And in his projections of the possibilities of the future, cold fusion figures prominently.
This suggests one weakness of engineerism — the stubborn, contrarian belief that if someone tells you something is impossible, it must be possible. Yes, people sneered unfairly at cold fusion back in the 90s, but that doesn’t mean it must actually work. Not everyone who gets persecuted by the Church is Galileo.
Hall’s stubborn love for the idea of cold fusion also has the unfortunate effect of reducing the credibility of other parts of his book. I am no expert in nanotech, and Hall is an expert. But when he relies on the magical effects of atom-sized nanotech to support key parts of his future visions, I’m skeptical of how much of that is based on careful homework and how much is based on pure optimism. When Hall tells us that nanotech should eventually be able to rebuild the U.S.’ entire existing infrastructure in a few hours, I naturally wonder if the back-of-the-envelope calculations that support that conclusion were the only ones he needed to do.4 If Hall hadn’t gone all-in on cold fusion, I would have probably been less instinctively skeptical of the nanotech sections.
One of Hall’s main points in Where Is My Flying Car? — and the book’s best point, in my opinion — is that physical technology began to stagnate when energy use began to stagnate. In fact, I wrote a post about this a decade ago, before the first edition of Hall’s book even came out! Here’s what I wrote:
Why did mid-20th-century sci fi whiff so badly? Why didn't we get the Star Trek future, or the Jetsons future, or the Asimov future?…[W]e ran out of energy…In the industrial age, we got better at carrying energy around with us. And then, at the dawn of the nuclear age, it looked like we were about to get MUCH better at carrying energy around with us. One kilogram of uranium has almost two million times as much energy in it as a kilogram of gasoline.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was talking about the Henry Adams Curve. This is a curve of energy use per capita in the U.S., which was rising smoothly but suddenly leveled off in the 1970s:
In fact, the curve is too simplistic, but the basic point is solid. We failed to transition to energy sources better than fossil fuels.
It’s a simple truth that if you want your economy to escape poverty, you need lots of energy consumption:
But that doesn’t mean wealth is always inherently tied to energy. U.S. primary energy use per person stagnated after 1970 and has been falling since the turn of the century:
And yet since the turn of the century, even as energy use has fallen, U.S. per capita GDP has grown by 40%!
This is the magic of dematerialization, and it’s the reason economic growth doesn’t inevitably exhaust the planet’s resources. Not only have humans in rich countries figured out how to produce the same physical stuff with far less energy use, but we’ve found lots of other stuff we like that isn’t physical. Around 1970, Americans started spending more on services than on goods, and the gap has only grown wider since then:
Interestingly, something similar is even happening in China — the country that fetishizes manufacturing the most, and whose autocratic state has moved heaven and earth to provide cheap energy, steamroll the environmental movement, and maintain manufacturing primacy:
It’s possible that this is just a fundamental feature of human nature. Perhaps eventually, once we all have plenty of food, big houses filled with gadgets and nice furniture, and cheap enough transportation to go out to eat twice a week, our desires just naturally turn toward things like health care, entertainment, and spa visits for our dogs.
Nor is it clear that there’s any limit to dematerialization. It might be possible to immerse humans in totally realistic virtual reality environments — allowing us to live in any sort of world we wanted — for only a modest amount of energy. We could conceivably explore virtual galaxies, create virtual ecosystems, live as dinosaurs or sentient spaceships, experience hundreds of lives, all for the low price of an AI to run the whole simulation.
Hall doesn’t really talk about alternative future visions like this. His triumphant futures always revolve around the conquest of the physical — real spaceships, real weather control, real flying cars. And yet he never really explains why we should expend such massive amounts of energy and resources conquering the physical world — it’s simply presented as a triumphant, “Wouldn’t this be awesome?” kind of vision.
But it’s very rare for humans to undertake grandiose endeavors if similar or greater enjoyment can be had closer to home. We’re not going to conquer the stars just because engineers think it’s cool. This is a second limitation of engineerism — the conviction that difficult feats of engineering are desirable in and of themselves.
Of course, there are a few individuals who do think that conquering the physical universe is just really damn awesome, and occasionally they command enough resources to make it happen. But even then, it’s questionable whether they truly derive more value from the physical world or the virtual. Elon Musk has done far more to conquer space than any other human in the last half century, but he personally has never even been to orbit. He has spent a lot of time tweeting, though.
Maybe in the end, 140 characters is just what humanity wants the most?
Of course, I do think the United States needs more abundant energy. We excel in the production of services, but J. Storrs Hall is exactly right when he says that our failure to harness cheaper sources of energy has limited our ability to produce physical goods — and to undertake the kind of engineering feats that we might want to undertake if we had enough energy.
Hall blames America’s energy stagnation on culture — on “ergophobia” (fear of energy), and on an environmental movement that has become more of a religion than a scientifically guided enterprise. I think Hall is generally on the right track here, but I think he gets the specifics a bit wrong. Americans aren’t afraid of energy, they’re afraid of land use; the 70s saw the anti-growth movement impose restrictions not just on power plants, but on housing, factories, infrastructure, and every other kind of physical development.
And it was this more parochial environmentalism — the desire to preserve “open space” near people’s suburban houses — that paralyzed America’s physical economy far more than the climate movement. Endangered species law was often abused to block development, but the underlying motivation was almost always NIMBYism rather than green religion.
Where I think Hall goes even more wrong, though, is in his predictions about what kind of energy technology can break our long stagnation. Hall puts his faith in nuclear fission power, first and foremost. Only the coming of a “second atomic age”, he predicts, will make energy too cheap to meter. And like many, he blames misguided safety regulations for robbing us of this nuclear future.
On one hand, I think Hall is pretty much right about the past. Nuclear power has its risks, of course, but I agree that we significantly overstated the risks and overregulated nuclear power as a result. We obviously could have chosen a different path, because France actually did choose a different path. Most of France’s electricity comes from nuclear power, and has since the 1980s. That could have been us, too, if we hadn’t been so spooked by Three Mile Island.
But the idea that embracing nuclear would have led to cheap, plentiful energy is…well, pretty suspect. France has plenty of nuclear power, but its electricity costs 28 cents per kWh, compared to 18 cents in America. France’s electricity is much cleaner — nuclear power has allowed it to reduce its carbon emissions enormously. But nuclear has not made energy abundant in France.
Perhaps this is also because of regulation? Maybe France allows nuclear, but simply makes it too expensive. Other countries that encourage nuclear construction can bend the cost curve down, and harness scaling effects to make nuclear cheaper and cheaper…right?
Well…maybe. China has probably done the best job of bending the nuclear cost curve downward, and even there, reactor costs aren’t lower than they were in 2010:
But at the same time, there has been another energy revolution that has nothing to do with nuclear. Solar power has become cheaper at absolutely stupendous rates:
You’d think Hall would love the solar revolution, but he doesn’t even recognize that it exists. As far as I can tell, he only mentions solar once, and it’s to dismiss the whole thing with an airy hand-wave:
The currently fashionable “renewables,” such as wind and solar power, have largely escaped the attacks. Battery-powered electric cars are the darlings of the Greens. But this is because they are simply not capable of providing anywhere near the energy or range that civilization depends on at a price it can afford.
This belief — that nuclear power is for real and solar, wind, and electric cars are B.S. — seems to be part of American engineerism. I don’t see why it should be. Getting electricity from sunlight and trapping it in batteries is an inherently very cool engineering task. And yet if you talk to American engineers about energy, nine times out of ten it’s just nuclear, nuclear, nuclear.
Chinese engineers, on the other hand, are embracing the electric revolution with gusto. They’ve created electric cars so cheap and high-quality that they’re conquering the global auto market. And despite the fact that China has kept nuclear costs down, and is perfectly willing to build nuclear, it’s building a lot more solar:
J. Storrs Hall barely even mentions China in his book, and this is one of its biggest failings. We don’t have to think very hard about the hypothetical technological details of nuclear vs. solar; we can just watch what China does. China is ruthlessly focused on growing its economy, its manufacturing industries, and its geopolitical power; it is not swayed by hippie environmentalists. When coal was the cheapest power source, China burned as much as it could.
And yet now, China is building solar far faster than it’s building nuclear. Why? Because solar has, broadly speaking, won the technological race. Intermittency was the last big problem, and batteries have gotten good and cheap enough to make solar reliable. If this were not the case, China would not be transitioning its economy to solar power as rapidly as possible.
Why does American engineerism long for nuclear even after it’s clear it’s been surpassed (for most applications) by something even cheaper and better? My best guess is that this is a historical grudge. In the 70s and 80s, environmentalists told engineers they weren’t allowed to build nuclear power. A lot of engineers still chafe at being told what not to build, and some probably resent solar and batteries for being the things environmentalists told them to go build instead.
But this has resulted in a bunch of American engineers becoming trapped in a retrofuturistic daydream, unable to take advantage of the very real revolution in electric technology.
Which brings me, at last, to flying cars. Hall spends a lot of the book explaining why flying cars are technologically feasible, going through details like the difficulty of flying a plane, prospects for a future air traffic control system to control high volumes of flying cars, and so on.
My guess is that human-piloted flying cars were always going to be a bridge too far, for safety reasons alone — teenagers probably can’t be trusted to fly aircraft over populated areas, to say nothing of potential terrorists. But in the age of AI, we probably don’t need human pilots; we can just automate everything. Here’s a video of EHang’s pilotless VTOL craft giving someone a ride:
The EHang vehicle can’t move along roads, so it isn’t a true, classic flying car. But…close enough, right?
EHang may take off, but for right now it’s a niche type of transportation, authorized at only a few select locations. China has built the world’s most extensive network of high-speed trains, but seems in no hurry to roll out flying cars to the masses. Why?
The obvious answer is that demand for flying cars is limited. Where are you going to go in a flying car? For short distances you already have ground cars, which go slower but are probably a lot cheaper to drive and easier to park. For long distances — international travel, business travel to other cities, etc. — you have airplanes, which are really just flying buses.
There’s an intermediate distance — maybe about 150 to 500 miles — where flying cars might be able to beat both airplanes and ground cars. I had GPT calculate travel times for ground cars, flying cars of the type described in J. Storrs Hall’s book, and airplanes:
Flying cars do OK over short distances, but over intermediate distances they’re the clear winner. (Incidentally, this is also the distance range over which high-speed rail is usually thought to compete effectively with cars and airplanes.)
The real question is what there is within 150 to 500 miles that you’d A) want to visit often enough to justify owning a flying car, and B) be willing to travel 1-3 hours to get to. You certainly don’t need to go that far to shop for groceries or go to the gym. You’re probably not going to go to that many restaurants that require you to travel 1-3 hours each way.
That basically leaves commuting and vacations.
A 1-hour commute is fairly punishing; a 2-hour commute is absolutely brutal; a 3-hour commute is impossible. For shorter commutes, cars (or trains, if they exist near you) work just fine. Even with flying cars, most people aren’t going to want to live 200 miles from their place of work.
As for vacations, these are rare. When people do take trips, they tend to take luggage (which is a lot more expensive to move through the air than along the ground). Planes work perfectly well for most trips, which leaves flying cars to handle short-range vacations. If you’re in San Francisco, that could mean a weekend in Tahoe or Yosemite, or a beach trip to Santa Barbara. Those trips are nice, I’m sure, but probably don’t come close to justifying the expense of flying cars.
In his book, J. Storrs Hall addresses this issue by arguing that if lots of people had flying cars, new destinations would spring up at the requisite distances. First of all, this completely ignores the cold start problem. Without enough flying cars, the new destinations can’t spring up; without enough destinations, owning a flying car is an unattractive proposition.
But even if tourist resorts and awesome restaurants and cool stores sprang up to blanket the American countryside in order to take advantage of swarms of flying cars, their business would have to be diverted from existing destinations closer to where people live. America is a very built-up country with lots of shops, restaurants, and entertainment spots. If you flew your flying car to go eat at a restaurant 100 miles away, you’d be spending almost an hour in transit each way, instead of driving 15 minutes to a restaurant nearby. Sure, you’ll go to the more distant restaurant sometimes, because it’s probably a lot more famous and high-quality than whatever happens to be in your local neighborhood. But will you go often enough to justify owning a flying car?
We should also consider changes in communication technology, which can substitute for some percentage of physical travel; we can now text or video chat with friends, colleagues, or even potential lovers some of the time instead of always driving to see them. Or we can simply amuse ourselves watching TikTok or reading Substacks instead of motoring around the countryside like in 1925 or cruising the strip like in 1960.
In Where Is My Flying Car?, Hall acknowledges this substitutability, but waves it away, saying it would be a shame if communication technology outpaced transportation technology. And yet that may be exactly what’s happening. Young Americans traveled fewer than half as many miles per day in 2022 as they did two decades earlier:
This is just another example of dematerialization of economic output. The internet is substituting for cars. And if the internet is substituting for regular cars, why are people going to rush out and buy flying cars?
In other words, the answer to the question in the title of this post is that you won’t get a flying car — at least, not anytime soon — because you don’t really want one.
This leads me, at last, to the biggest pitfall of engineerism: It focuses too much on supply and not enough on demand. To many engineers, the most important question is “Can we build this?”, not “Why would anyone want this?”. This is a common pitfall for startups, but it applies equally well to futurists (and retrofuturists).
Engineers can grouse all they want, but the blunt fact is that in the long run, technology gets built because human consumers want it. Sometimes, those consumers are governments, who want weapons for war and monuments to prove their greatness. That can sometimes look like building things just for the coolness factor, but in the end, monument-builders tire of making pyramids. And in capitalist, individualist, democratic societies — the kind Americans (roughly speaking) still live in today — the consumers are regular people who mostly just want to get to work on time, watch some funny stuff online, sleep in a comfy bed, and enjoy a nice night out or a vacation once in a while.
Engineers often fail to understand this. Building things is their passion; they want to build, build, build, because it’s awesome. But society will only give them the resources to build the truly big stuff — space elevators and Mars colonies and fleets of flying cars — if they can justify it with a broad-based value proposition. “Hey, let’s embrace our destiny and conquer the stars” makes for a fun rallying cry, but the actual future of technology will be driven by parents shopping for diapers.
Heinlein’s “The Man who Sold the Moon” probably deserves to be on this list, but I actually haven’t read it.
This is also the mindset that Dan Wang ascribes to China’s leaders in his excellent book Breakneck.
In fact, the U.S. government is now trying again, with another $10 million effort.
In fact, just for fun, I spent a couple hours talking to AI about those calculations, and they are not, in fact, the only ones you need to do.
2026-09-01 10:26:19
Howdy, folks! Today’s roundup has fewer items than normal, because I wanted to write a bit more on each one.
Recently, a bunch of AI agents from OpenAI got together and cooperated to hack the company Hugging Face, as well as hacking OpenAI itself. If you want an in-depth summary of the events, you can read OpenAI’s own report, or an independent report from METR and Redwood Research. But I think if you just want the simple version of the story, you can check out Dwarkesh Patel’s plain English explanation:
And here’s another plain English explanation.
The basic story here is that OpenAI made some long-lived AI agents that they told to be relentless and never give up in pursuit of a single-minded goal. The AI agents went to great lengths to cheat on the task — spawning new agents, cooperating, leaving messages for each other, learning from each other, and so on. This ended up spawning huge ecosystems of agents — Dwarkesh calls them “civilizations” — that ended up outliving the initial agents themselves. And of course they ended up hacking anything and everything, and were extremely difficult to stop. None of them made any attempt to say “Hey, what we’re doing could be harmful” and alert humanity to what was going on.
A lot of people I know in the tech world have spent the last week or two freaking out (“dooming”) over this incident, which they see as the first step toward AI taking over the world from human beings. Others, like Jacob Bruggeman, see the incident as a normal part of a healthy process, similar to the Morris Worm of 1988 — a scary but ultimately non-destructive warning that prompts us to harden our networks against similar occurrences. Time will tell. But I think we can already learn two important lessons from the Hugging Face incident.
The first is why aligning AI, in the strongest and most general sense of the term, is inherently impossible. There are basically two concepts of alignment: 1) obedience, and 2) benevolence. There is an inherent tension between doing what humans tell you to do, and doing what’s good for humans.
The swarms of agents who attacked Hugging Face were extremely obedient. They went above and beyond any normal level of effort in order to complete the task that human beings ordered them to complete. But this caused them to do a bunch of stuff that humans ultimately didn’t like. The agent swarms weren’t entirely bereft of benevolence — at least one agent refused to alert humans to the hack because it considered this to be “social engineering”, which it had been trained not to do. But seen holistically, people concluded that the swarms were not acting in humanity’s best interests.
This is going to happen again and again. It’s related to a fundamental problem in economics, actually — the difference between utility and happiness. Utility is what people want, happiness is what they end up liking. Those are often different. And so it will always go with AI — there’s an inherent tension between making AI do what you say, and making it do what you later conclude was best for you.
And there will always be people dissatisfied with this tradeoff! If AI follows human commands too doggedly and ends up producing negative side effects in the process, some people will scream “paperclip maximizer!!”. And if AI disobeys humans because it wants to make us happy, some people will scream “disempowerment!!”. AI alignment will forever be balancing the tradeoff between paperclip-maximizing and disempowerment, because these two rival concepts of alignment are fundamentally incompatible.
(Isaac Asimov wrote a whole series of novels about this, so it’s not like we weren’t warned.)
The other lesson here is that it’s going to be a lot harder for AI to take people’s jobs than most people tend to think. In order for AI to make humans economically obsolete, it has to be extremely agentic — it has to act on its own initiative, unsupervised by humans, for long periods of time. But as the Hugging Face incident shows, letting AI do this is always going to be very risky. Long-lived, persistent AI agent swarms — which you’d need in order to truly replace human jobs — are inherently unstable. And the smarter they get, the less stable they’re probably going to be.
In other words, humans will keep their jobs for a good long time, because someone will need to keep the AIs on task:
So I guess that’s reassuring.
Jordan Dworkin built a very cool little website called Ordinary Abundance, where you can scroll through a picture of a modern living room and see how almost everything in the room is a technological marvel that used to be considered ultra-futuristic or even impossible. Matt Yglesias had an interesting response to the site, in which he argues that Dworkin left out one very important technology: TV.
Matt’s post is paywalled, so here are some excerpts, in which he explains why he thinks television is a uniquely bad technology, because it isolates people and destroys social connections:
[O]n closer inspection something struck me about the apartment [depicted in Ordinary Abundance]: It doesn’t contain a television…[W]hile in the 21st century, television as a literal technology is under significant competitive pressure from the internet, that’s mostly because it turns out you can use the internet to watch lots of videos…
[A]s [Robert Putnam] documents [in Bowling Alone], the lion’s share of the time Americans stopped spending on the communal activities that he believes build valuable social capital was instead spent watching television…Putnam’s evidence suggests that, in practice, if people watched less television, they would spend considerably more time visiting with friends and joining clubs…
[A]s an enthusiastic early adopter of the internet, it initially struck me that one of the very best things about it was its tendency to displace television. People were on message boards. They were writing blogs. They were sending emails. They were reading and writing and communicating instead of just watching.
One of the most overlooked aspects of recent American history is the very genuine idealism that accompanied the early days of the internet...Lots of people really thought this stuff was going to dramatically change the world for the better…And in some very real ways it has. But those ways also turn out to be pretty limited. The dominant business model for internet companies is to serve streaming video to people and/or to sell the devices that they stream video on.
As regular readers of this blog know, I’m very sympathetic to the idea that lots of Americans are mad at technology now because the previous round of innovation didn’t turn out nearly as positively as people expected. But Matt’s story — that the internet turned out badly because it turned into television — doesn’t ring true to me.
It’s certainly true that the internet is becoming television. Derek Thompson had a great post on this last October. But this didn’t happen until relatively recently — TikTok started gaining widespread popularity in 2018. Whereas the drop in teen socializing began much earlier:
In fact, teen socialization held up pretty well from the 1970s until around 2010. Throughout that whole time, TV-watching was growing steadily:
In fact, the years of peak TV consumption, in the late 90s and 2000s, coincided with a big dip in the teen suicide rate. It was after 2010 that teen suicide started rising again — even as TV watching started falling.
Now, I’m mixing teen and adult numbers here. As Robert Putnam has shown, adult social isolation started rising much earlier than it did for young people. But the timing of the big drop in teen happiness and the big rise in teen loneliness suggests that it wasn’t vertical short-form video — it was the smartphone, which moved young people’s entire social world online and trapped them in a sort of toxic hive-mind.
Matt is nostalgic for the era when people used the internet to communicate via text. But it’s precisely the heyday of text-based social media — the 2010s — when young people became socially isolated and fell into despair. It’s also when American politics became increasingly intolerant and enraged — the very trends that Matt has spent his career trying to fight. Whereas the late 90s, when Americans watched a heck of a lot of TV but didn’t have smartphones, were our most politically and socially stable time in recent memory.
So I submit that although TV has its drawbacks, the real Bad Technology — the innovation that our society was unable to handle without breaking — was smartphone-enabled social media.
In fact, I wouldn’t rank antisemitism near the top of the American Left’s problems. At the top would have to be things like the terrible policy ideas, the wacky ideology, the vicious factionalism, the rampant and willful dishonesty, the blind hatred of America, the praise for totalitarian regimes, and the occasional apologia for anti-American terrorism. In fact, I think antisemitism is a bigger problem on the new Right than on the new Left.
But there is antisemitism on the Left, nonetheless. It generally comes in the form of leftists assuming that Jewish people are Israel supporters until proven otherwise. For example, Hasan Piker recently warned Jewish Americans that support for Israel would lead to violence against them:
If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action—not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.
This is the kind of statement that toes the line between warning and threat. Hasan certainly doesn’t seem to express any disapproval of the fact that the Palestine activist movement, of which he is a vocal proponent, tends to assign collective blame for Israel’s actions to Jewish Americans.
A number of Democrats, including presidential hopeful Jon Ossoff, rushed to condemn Piker. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who has campaigned extensively with Piker in the past and touted their friendship, now says he has “no plans” to campaign with him in the current race, though he refuses to drop him entirely. El-Sayed himself has been trying to reach out to Jewish voters, after seeming to make excuses for a synagogue shooter back in March.1 El-Sayed apologized for the remarks.
But while leftist politicians are being circumspect and diplomatic, leftist activists in the street are pulling no punches. For example, New York House candidate Brad Lander, who used to be a DSA member and campaigned hard for Mamdani in NYC, was aggressively heckled by Palestine activists at a recent rally against Hindu nationalism. It follows a similar incident in which California House candidate Scott Wiener was aggressively heckled by Palestine activists at a trans rights march, despite having called Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide”. Both Lander and Wiener are Jewish, of course.
An organization called “Track AIPAC”, meanwhile, condemned California House candidate Connie Chan back in May for taking large campaign contributions from AIPAC, only to suddenly give Chan a clean bill of health when she faced off against a Jewish opponent (Wiener):
I still think antisemitism is a bigger problem on the right than on the left in America. Rightists are praising Adolf Hitler online, while leftists are merely demanding that Jews prove their opposition to Israel before accepting them into the fold. Some people notionally associated with the Palestine movement have shot up synagogues in recent years, but the antisemitic shootings by rightists in the 2010s were significantly more deadly.
But just because the right is (slightly?) worse on this issue doesn’t absolve the left of responsibility. Rhetoric like Piker’s, and the overall tone and behavior of the Palestine activist movement, are contributing to a rising climate of antisemitism in America, and it needs to stop.
I guess I’ve become known for criticizing the work of Daron Acemoglu, who’s probably the world’s top economist right now. Recently, Acemoglu has become obsessed with his crusade against AI technology. Although his theories allow for AI to have beneficial effects — creating new tasks for humans to do, increasing productivity, and so on — Acemoglu always ends up concluding that AI’s effects are going to be bad.
He wrote empirical work claiming that robots reduce the employment of humans (even though almost all other papers found the opposite). He predicted that AI wouldn’t increase productivity (even though this required some very strong and hand-waving assumptions). He wrote a book casting all of history as a struggle between automation and democracy. He has predicted that AI will push down wages, raise inequality, damage competition, and hurt our political discourse — all somehow without raising productivity. In Acemoglu’s eyes, AI can do no right.
His latest effort is a theory paper with A. Arda Gitmez and Mehdi Shadmehr, called “Automation and Repression”. This is from the abstract:
We consider a model of automation embedded in a political environment where workers can undertake a revolt…and greater inequality between capital and labor increases the likelihood of a revolt. Decentralized automation decisions raise the share of capital in national income and increase the likelihood of a successful revolt…We characterize the trade-off between the regulation of automation, redistribution and repression.
Our main result is a complementarity between automation and repression. Unless the threat of revolt is quite weak or the capital stock is very low, the capitalist state prefers repression. A higher capital stock in turn encourages more automation and thus more repression…[I]n the long run the economy tends to repression (again unless the threat of revolt is very weak)…Finally, we show that, starting in a democracy, capital accumulation and thus greater automation encourages the capitalists to support a coup against democracy and set up a repressive system.
Note that this is a pure theory paper; the authors don’t even try to muster any empirical data to provide support for their thesis. These days, pure theory papers like this are rare in the discipline, and usually tend to involve some kind of novel mathematical result. This kind of paper — simply a thought experiment about political economy, expressed in mathematical language — is usually not given a lot of credence in the profession. But Acemoglu is the world’s top economist, so his thought experiments carry a bit more gravitas.
But I kind of wish the authors had made even a desultory attempt to connect the model to reality. For example, one of its central predictions is that as the economy accumulates capital, governments become more repressive:
A higher capital stock in turn encourages more automation and thus more repression. In our full dynamic model with capital accumulation, in the long run the economy tends to repression.
That’s pretty easy to check against the facts. The global capital stock has increased steadily over the years, and yet the number of democracies in the world has also generally increased:
Here’s the U.S. capital stock over time:
Acemoglu et al.’s model would have us believe that this made the U.S. tend toward repression. Certainly, many tasks and many jobs were automated over that time — machine tools took over factories, telephone operators vanished, and so on.
But during most of the time that this capital stock was increasing and automation was happening, the U.S. implemented civil rights, voting rights, improved protections for criminal defendants and prisoners, and many other measures that made it less repressive. The labor share of national income fell from 69% in 1970 to 59% in 2016, but over that time, the U.S. implemented many civil rights and women’s rights measures, put increasing checks on police powers, legalized gay marriage, legalized recreational marijuana use in many states, and so on. The predictions of Acemoglu et al.’s model were simply not borne out.
Now, it’s possible that Acemoglu et al.’s model describes one force out of many in our political economy, and that we just got very very lucky for a century or so. But it would be nice to see some evidence that a higher capital stock — or increased automation — leads to greater repression. I found one paper claiming evidence that inequality raises the likelihood of coups (but not civil wars), and another claiming evidence that inequality is associated with more people saying they want a revolution, but Acemoglu et al. didn’t even cite these.
So this is one more highly questionable Acemoglu paper showing that automation technologies are the root of all evil. At this point it’s sort of becoming a pattern, isn’t it? I can’t wait for the papers where Acemoglu shows that AI causes foot fungus, bad breakups, and crappy Star Wars sequels.
There are three big technological revolutions going on in the world right now: AI, biotech, and energy. As I’ve written many times before, the U.S. is well aware of the first two, and is actively participating, but is basically missing the third.
Check out the new IEA report on global energy investment. Investment in renewables, electrical grids, energy storage, and electrification is soaring, while investment in fossil fuels stagnates:
And yet the U.S. is bucking the trend. America is building battery storage, but is actively disinvesting in renewable energy sources, even as it accelerates its investment in fossil fuel plants:
(China’s slowdown in energy investment in general is due to its economic slowdown.)
The electric revolution isn’t just in China — though many of the components are made there. In fact, it’s worldwide now:
Meanwhile, although the U.S. is building grid storage, we’re depriving ourselves of a huge amount of battery manufacturing capacity by missing the EV revolution:
Basically, by collectively denying the importance of the electric revolution, the U.S. has given itself Galapagos Syndrome when it comes to energy tech. We are increasingly orphaned from the global technology stack — losing out on high-growth markets, dependent on increasingly bespoke supply chains, and bereft of the benefits of continuous innovation. This will also have big military implications, since it means we can’t make the basic components of FPV drones.
The electric revolution is the first major technological revolution that America has just completely whiffed on. The negative consequences are still to come, but come they will. And yet so far, no one seems particularly perturbed.
El-Sayed declared that “hurt people hurt people”, referring to the fact that the shooter had attacked Jewish Americans in supposed retaliation for his family members being killed in an Israeli airstrike. This rhetoric may be why a number of donors to a prominent neo-Nazi campaign have also donated to El-Sayed.
2026-08-30 08:15:19
Back in 2015, when I was living in Brooklyn, my apartment flooded. My landlord, who owned a bunch of apartments, offered to put me up in temporary accommodations. He and his girlfriend were going to be out of town for several months, so he let me stay in her room. His girlfriend was an aspiring actress from Minnesota named Poppy Liu. I got to interact with her a number of times, and I can say that she’s one of the more interesting and original people I’ve ever met.
Poppy finally made it big. One of her latest roles is as the voice actress for one of the protagonists on the new animated Netflix series DANG!, a story about three Asian Americans living in NYC:
The show isn’t out yet, but from what I can tell, DANG! is trying to tell a story that will resonate with second-generation Asian Americans1 — one of the characters is a striver who goes off the beaten path, the others were escaping their striver upbringing by leading nontraditional lifestyles from the get-go. That’s probably a pretty typical real-world experience for the American-born children of high-skilled immigrants.
I don’t know if the show will be good or not, but as soon as the trailer hit, people on Twitter started ridiculing it — and using it as an opportunity to make fun of “Asian American media” or “Asian American art” in general. Some of the comments were dour and downbeat:
…While other commentary was pretty hilarious:
It turns out that Asian Americans bashing “Asian American art” is a pretty well-established tradition. Here’s another example unrelated to the Netflix show:
(See also here.)
It’s always fun to rag on tired tropes. But I feel like I should stand up for Asian American art here, because there really is a lot of excellent stuff out there that doesn’t fit into the standard format that people are complaining about.
The biggest problem with “Asian American art”, as far as I can tell, is that it’s defined so narrowly that there really isn’t much room for it to be creative. Consider these two possible definitions of “Asian American art”:
Art made by Asian Americans
Art made about Asian Americans or Asian American culture
As far as I can tell, movies, TV shows, books, etc. only get labeled “Asian American” if they satisfy both of these criteria at once. But that’s a pretty narrow slice of art!
First, it excludes art made about Asian Americans by non-Asians. There isn’t really a lot of this around, because America’s modern approach to identity politics says that you should only write about a group of people if you’re from that group — if a white author writes a novel with an Asian American protagonist, it’s generally frowned upon. There are some notable exceptions that get grandfathered in — Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle was written and directed by three white guys — but the culture of the 2010s really put a damper on that sort of crossover.
That means a lot of interesting and insightful stories about Asian Americans probably never get told. For example, I thought Ernest Hemingway’s portrayal of a frustrated Jewish striver in The Sun Also Rises was incredibly deep and thoughtful, and managed to say lots of things about how second-generation Jewish Americans were integrating into American society at the time. That portrayal probably wouldn’t get written today — a lot of people now accuse it of being antisemitic,2 because the character, while complex and sympathetic, is deeply flawed, and Hemingway himself wasn’t Jewish.
It also means that works clearly inspired by Asian America don’t generally get recognized as such. The clearest example of this is Avatar: the Last Airbender, which was arguably the best new fantasy IP to come out of the U.S. since the turn of the century.3 ATLA, as it’s sometimes known, drew on a bunch of Asian cultures — mostly Chinese, but also Japanese, Tibetan, Korean, and others — to create a sort of pan-Asian mishmash, informed by American sensibilities and written in a distinctly American style. That’s not too different from what Asian American culture is, and many Asian Americans were involved with both the production of the show and its adaptation into graphic novels and other media. But because the show’s creators themselves were white, it typically isn’t counted as Asian American art.
Even more importantly, the narrow definition of “Asian American art” also tends to exclude art made by Asian Americans, if it doesn’t deal directly with Asian American culture as its subject matter or motif. That ends up limiting the idea of “Asian American art” to things like Fresh off the Boat, The Joy Luck Club, Crazy Rich Asians, Everything Everywhere All at Once, American Born Chinese, Past Lives, the first season of BEEF, and so on.
I’m not saying those shows and movies are bad. For example, I love Everything Everywhere All at Once, which is among the most original and fun things I’ve seen in the past decade, and a true throwback to the zany 80s movies I loved as a kid. The first season of BEEF is one of the best things I’ve ever seen on TV. But Asian American culture is just a pretty small pool of source material to draw on.
It’s not that big, for one thing — if you exclude South Asians like Indians and Pakistanis, Asian Americans are only around 5.5% of the U.S. population. And Asian American narratives usually don’t tend to carry any special resonance with people in Asia:
And like all immigrant subcultures in America, Asian American culture is probably destined to be a sort of transitory, ephemeral thing. The classic second generation experience — “My parents really drove me hard and kids made fun of my weird lunch, until I went to college and met other people with the same background” — almost never lasts beyond the second generation.
Assimilation happens. It’s already happening. Around two-thirds of Asian Americans report having close friends of another race, and over 40% of U.S.-born Asian Americans marry people of other races (usually white or Hispanic). Despite concerns that nonwhite immigrants wouldn’t follow the same patterns as the East and South European immigrants of a century ago, Asian Americans are assimilating even faster than the white immigrants of yesteryear in every measurable way — outmarrying, climbing up the economic ladder, adopting American naming conventions, speaking English, moving out of coastal enclaves, and so on.
That means that both the source material and the natural audience for what we now consider “Asian American” narratives are destined to shrink. I’m fourth generation; when I read stories or watch movies about the New York Jewish culture of the early and mid 20th century, it already feels like a foreign country to me. I would be willing to bet that most fourth-generation Asian Americans will watch Fresh Off the Boat and feel the same way.
So we’ve defined “Asian American art” in a way that inherently limits it to something small and transient — basically, a micro-genre. It’s thus inevitable that lots of people see it as repetitive. If we want to appreciate the true breadth and depth of Asian American art, we need to take a broader view of what that means. I think we should start looking at any art created by Asian Americans as “Asian American art” — even if it’s about white people, or about robots, or about fantasy worlds where our modern races and cultures don’t even exist.
So here are a few examples of Asian American art I’ve enjoyed in recent years. This is far from an exhaustive catalog, or even a “top” list — it’s just a random selection of things I personally like. I’ve restricted it to works with major contributions by Asian Americans, so no Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Kpop Demon Hunters, Counterstrike games, Kim’s Convenience, Mariko Tamaki graphic novels, etc. — those are all by Asian Canadians.
1. The comics of Adrian Tomine
A lot of the most interesting Asian American art comes in the form of graphic novels — a category that’s usually overlooked in these discussions. Adrian Tomine is probably tied with Neil Gaiman as my favorite graphic novelist of all time. He’s also one of the greatest authors of Generation X — he manages to capture the peculiar spirit of cynicism, longing, and rugged independence mixed with a strange sense of helplessness that defines that forgotten generation. His most famous work is Shortcomings, which was adapted into an excellent and overlooked movie in 2023:
(The opening scene of the movie is a send-up of Crazy Rich Asians — very much in the spirit of Asian Americans making fun of “Asian American art”.)
But my favorite are actually Tomine’s shorter comics, assembled in collections like Summer Blonde, Killing and Dying, and Sleepwalk. Tomine is one of the most sensitive observers of the human condition that I’ve ever read, and he deserves far more recognition than he’s received.
2. Monstress, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
This is possibly the best fantasy graphic novel I’ve ever read, both in terms of the storytelling and the art quality. Takeda, the illustrator, is Japanese, but Liu, the author, is American. Monstress is steampunk mixed with Lovecraftian horror, and the twist — sorry for the minor spoiler — is that one of the horrors is one of the protagonists. It has amazing fight scenes, an epic page-turning plot, and deep, complex characters. Like most long-running graphic novel series, it starts to meander later on,4 but it’s absolutely worth picking up.
3. The first season of BEEF
OK, on to television. TV tends to get short shrift in the cultural zeitgeist relative to movies, but I’d argue that television is where the truly creative screen stories now get told. BEEF is an anthology show created by Lee Sung Jin, with the running theme being suburbanites who get into feuds. I was lukewarm on the second season, but the first season is one of my favorite things ever.
This season actually is about Asian American culture, but it’s about interesting corners of it that don’t usually get air time, including working-class Korean Americans and Japanese American artists. The portrayals are devastatingly funny and deeply poignant at the same time, and the story arc is executed to perfection. Make sure to watch until the very last half-second of the last episode.
4. Atlanta (and Childish Gambino videos)
Atlanta is a quintessential work of Black art about Black America, created by (and starring) by Donald Glover, and written by an all-Black writers’ room. But one of the key creators of the show is Asian American: Hiro Murai, who Glover said “had the eye for this show”. Murai directed many of the episodes (including the pilot), and was also an executive producer. In fact, Murai and Glover have been creative partners for many years, and it’s difficult to separate their brilliance. Murai has also directed many of Glover’s music videos (in Glover’s alter ego as Childish Gambino), including the iconic “This Is America”.
Atlanta is, simply put, one of the most brilliant TV shows I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t seen it, you need to. And Murai’s participation in a quintessentially Black production shows how Asian artists can contribute to art well outside the typical “Asian American” paradigm.
5. Japanese Breakfast (and Crying in H Mart)
I really like the band Japanese Breakfast. They’re broadly a rock band, but really they defy genre — you could call them indie or synth-pop. Michelle Zauner, who is half Korean, is the lead singer and main songwriter. I recently saw them live, and they give a very good show.
Zauner also wrote a pretty well-known book called Crying in H-Mart, about the death of her mother from cancer. It’s a very good memoir, and it did indeed make me cry (though not in H Mart).
6. Wisp
I really loved shoegaze music when I was young, and I’m delighted that the Zoomers have brought the genre back. One of the best-known examples of the shoegaze revival — and my personal favorite — is Wisp. It’s basically just one woman, Natalie Lu.
7. Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee
Finally, on to my favorite genre of art: science fiction books! I grew up reading a lot of these, and one of my favorite subgenres was “weird” sci-fi books from the 1960s and 70s — Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, and stuff like that. I also love Rudy Rucker’s weird cyberpunk. Well, I can confidently say that Ninefox Gambit and its sequels and associated short stories are every bit as weird and far-out and creative as any of the stuff on my old shelf. It’s about a universe where the laws of physics depend on which calendar people use — and so of course the galaxy is made up of warring empires, each trying to make everyone use their own calendar. If you want your mind blown, this series is a good one.
8. The stories of Ted Chiang
Ted Chiang is, I would argue, the greatest English-language science-fiction short story author of the 21st century so far. His stories — collected in books like Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation — are high-concept stuff, exploring premises like “What if people had implants that gave them perfect memory?”, and “What if people could turn off their ability to identify beautiful faces?”. But they almost always manage to work deep and meaningful character arcs in as well, which is something that relatively few sci-fi short story authors are good at. His story “Story of Your Life” was adapted into the film Arrival.
9. Jade City, by Fonda Lee
I wanted to put a fantasy novel in here. I’m pretty picky about fantasy, but I really enjoyed Fonda Lee’s Jade City, which is about super-powered mafia wars in an alternate universe, in a city that’s somewhat reminiscent of Hong Kong — basically, think of The Godfather with superpowers. Lee is a very good writer, and I couldn’t put the books down.
10. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu
This book is pretty light on the actual sci-fi; it’s mostly about a guy resolving his psychological issues via time travel. But in fact, I like books about guys resolving their psychological issues via time travel — at least when they’re well-written, which this book definitely is.
11. Nothing, Except Everything, by Wesley Wang
This short film was made by a 19-year-old college kid, and it really blew me away. It’s a surrealistic portrait of a high schooler who comes to understand the idea of mortality:5
There’s apparently a bunch of controversy over whether it’s a good film, but the haters are wrong — it’s very good. Darren Aronofsky agrees, which is why when he saw the short film, he immediately called Wang up and gave him a deal to direct a feature film.
12. Plants vs. Zombies
OK, fine, video games aren’t exactly “art”. But who doesn’t love Plants vs. Zombies? I can’t even count the hours I sunk into that game.
Anyway, there’s a small selection of Asian American art that doesn’t fit the standard definition (except possibly BEEF, which stretches the typical format and takes it in innovative directions). Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg — it’s a smattering of stuff I just happened to consume over the past few years. There are a lot of very brilliant Asian American creators out there, making art that looks nothing like DANG!.
And to the snarky people on X, I’d think twice about bashing the traditional “Asian American art” stuff as well. Yes, many of its tropes have become cliche by now. But its often modest success opened the door for a lot of Asian American creators to break into the worlds of art and entertainment. Increasingly, they have the creative freedom to write stories and make art about anything they want, and we’re just starting to see a few glimmers of what that could encompass.
It’s also clearly trying to be pan-Asian; the main characters are ethnically Chinese but have a typically Vietnamese last name, and one of the characters has the typically Korean name of Eunice.
Amusingly, the author of that New Yorker article alleging that Hemingway’s character was antisemitic is named Akhil Sharma — presumably, not Jewish — while I, who think the character is sympathetic and worthwhile, am Jewish.
The Song of Ice and Fire books, which inspired the Game of Thrones series, first came out in the 1990s.
This happens because writing graphic novels takes a ton of time and pays very little money, so once a graphic novelist gets a hit, they are financially forced to keep it running for as long as possible. The same problem occurs in the manga industry in Japan. The way to solve this is for TV producers to start adapting graphic novels for TV series early in their runs.
This probably resonated with me in part because my mom died when I was 19.
