AI development is the fastest road to idiocracy
The fewer people who are needed in production, the more, and the stupider, people are employed as decision-makers.
Let me say it first: I don't hold any prejudice against normal IQ people. In The Bell Curve (1994), Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray claimed that many people live in IQ-segregated bubbles. People in high-end residential areas, elite universities and advanced jobs mostly meet each other. Thereby they don't get to know many normal IQ people.1
I don't live in such a segregated environment. First, I live in Sweden, which is a bit too small for effective IQ segregation. I also live in the countryside outside a town where no one expects the smartest people to live. And I like people here. If there is anything I know, it is that normal IQ people are just as curious, just as humoristic, just as righteous, just as sensible and just as passionate as high IQ people. My many encounters with people I suppose to be of normal IQ have taught me one thing: The only thing that separates high IQ people from normal IQ people is that the former have a higher capacity to process information. That's it. Otherwise, high-IQ people are no better in any sense.
And still, having high information processing capacity is a good thing. I think it allows people to make better decisions. For example, If I have to undergo a medical procedure, I prefer a fairly intelligent person to oversee it. And most people agree with me on that point. For that reason, med school is difficult to enter and go though, in order to produce as skilled physicians as possible.
In general, our society's capacity to disproportionately leave decision making to people with above-average intelligence is one ingredient in its recipe for success. The less intelligent people have disproportionately been employed in positions with few important decisions to make. They have been laborers, factory workers, workmen, farmers, homemakers.
What happens when AI takes over more and more jobs that humans had to do previously? It doesn't lead to shorter working hours, as both Marc Andreessen and I have explained. Instead, it leads to new tasks being invented. That is, necessarily tasks that an AI can't perform.
What can't a computer do? Most of all, it can't take responsibility and be accountable. And the demand for accountability is limitless. There is always something that could work better than it does. The solution seems to be to make a person accountable for handling every little problem. They are tasked with checking that nothing goes wrong, in any area where something can go wrong. They become building inspectors who are supposed to make sure that people don't build things wrong, social workers that are supposed to make sure that people don't parent wrong, health inspectors who make sure restaurants don't poison people, environmental inspectors who are supposed to make sure the environment does not get degraded, animal inspectors who are supposed to make sure that animals are are not treated wrongly.
Low competence
This all means that the descendants of production workers, who are no more intelligent than their ancestors, are increasingly working with decision-making.
The process is already well under way. In 1970, about 10 percent of Americans graduated from university. Today, almost 40 percent do. There is an ideal that those 10 or 40 percent should be the smartest 10 or 40 percent. That ideal does not perfectly correspond with reality, of course. But the average university graduate doubtlessly was smarter in the 1970s.
Much of the bureaucracy of the modern welfare state was made up around the 1970s. Many public job positions were created by then, with their demands for educational credentials, job descriptions and responsibilities. Now those positions are filled with less and less intelligent people. Not primarily because the population as a whole gets more stupid. But because the most intelligent people are hired by the finance sector and IT sector instead, vacating positions in the public sector for the kind of people who would have been factory workers 30 years ago.
Occasionally, this phenomenon bubbles up to the surface. “Nursing students lack competence” was a headline in Swedish public service media a couple of years ago. From the article it was clear that what the nursing students lacked was not competence, but intelligence: Their teachers complained many of them lacked basic reading and writing skills. In another example, the Swedish police academy has been forced to lower its IQ requirements in order to fill all its places.
But these are exceptions. Mostly, it is not being talked about. I'm just sensing it. For example, there are discussions about building a new railway line in my region. Since it is supposed to affect our closest village I have felt obliged to read all of the preliminary reports on its planning. These reports are somewhat confusing. They clearly don’t seem to be the work of geniuses. Probably because they are not.
Last winter, the inability of the road traffic agency people of Sweden was briefly on the international news. A thousand cars had got stuck on the main road between Sweden's third biggest city, Malmö, and the rest of the country. It snowed so some trucks couldn't move. Before anyone could tell people not to drive into the main road from side roads, more and more cars were added to the mess.
People spent more than 24 hours in their cars. An ambulance with a patient got stuck. At least one child was taken to hospital after the 24 hour wait. (The hospital staff diagnosed the child with low blood sugar. Apparently, fasting is not for children). The military had to come and pick up people with their bandwagons.
As you can see in the BBC clip linked above, we don't talk about meters of snow. That almost never happens in southern Sweden. There was just some snow. Such weather occurs in temperate areas all over the world. Billions of people live in climates where it once in a while snows a lot at the same time. It counts as a nuisance, not a natural disaster. Why did it become a natural disaster in southern Sweden? Because people responsible for the road network couldn't make the right decisions at the right times2. In a society where more and more people are working as decision-makers, many corners of society get rather inept decision makers. With life-threatening results.
Did finance eat all the IQ?
More and more qualified jobs that involve decision-making over other people's lives are being created. People are not getting any smarter. Another factor is making it worse: The finance industry.
The finance industry is both necessary and essential. Where to put resources and not is an important question. A very important question, even. The smartest of the smartest who can be found are paid handsomely for doing that job. The question is just what happens to the rest of society, when more people are employed by finance and not anywhere else.
I found it surprisingly difficult to find any information about the development of the share of workers in the financial industry. Apparently, that is not a question being asked very often. At last I found a paper from 1993, comparing employment rates in different sectors3. Between 1970 and 1990 the Finance, insurance, real estate and business services sector grew more than any other sector of the economy, from roughly five to ten percent of the workforce in different rich countries. Then I find no data until around 2000. From then employment in the finance business seems to be rather flat.
I found a paper that estimates that growth in other parts of the economy is adversely affected by growth in the finance industry. The finance industry takes competent labor from the rest of the economy, the paper says.4
But that is more or less what I find.
It could be that the finance industry employs another kind of people now compared to 20 years ago. The more technical and the less social trading becomes, the more hyper-analytical people become employed in finance. So it could be that today's finance is eating the kind of very analytical people who are badly needed in other parts of society too. (In traffic planning, for example).
Can AI save us?
In theory, AI could be very useful to counter the fact that more and more decisions are being made by less and less competent people. With AI assistance, one very competent person should be able to make only a few standardized decisions which the AI could then apply on thousands of similar problems. It is not ideal, but it would be vastly better than the arbitrariness created by midwits interpreting laws and rules they hardly grasp themselves.
Unfortunately, the current societal trend is for the opposite. Instead of letting fewer people solve the same amount of problems we are letting more people solve even more problems. Society’s standard response to new problems is that we need a new person to oversee it.
This is most likely due to the urge of always having someone accountable. This is not something an AI can solve. An AI can’t be accountable. For that you need a real person. And this real person can only be accountable if he or she has some real decision making ability.
As society gets richer and richer it can afford to care for more and more problems. More and more problems mean more and more decision makers. And since there is a finite number of smart people these new decision makers will be more and more stupid. Because society getting richer does not necessarily make people smarter.
My other posts on IQ:
Confessions of an everyday apopheniac
IQ and intelligence - a bifurcated tail
Charles Murray, Richard Herrnstein The Bell Curve, 1994, 8 percent of e-book
That was the conclusion of the report the Traffic Agency issued on their own failure https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/skane/hard-kritik-mot-trafikverket-i-utredning-om-kaoset-pa-e22
Todd M Godbout, Employment change and sectoral distribution in 10 countries, 1993, https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1993/10/art1full.pdf
Why does financial sector growth crowd out real economic growth? by Stephen G Cecchetti and Enisse Kharroubi, 201 https://www.bis.org/publ/work490.pdf
I am happily reading your substack since at least 2 years, usually getting a fresh and spirited perspective on things I care about. Thank you for that! However, your classist understanding of intelligence ("...production workers, who are no more intelligent than their ancestors") defies every fiber of my being. Let me tell you that I come from a real socialist country, one of which ceased to exist in '89. The success those countries had in recruiting the brightest minds from the literal working class can not possibly have escaped you entirely?! Especially as you live in Sweden, which from my understanding is much more egalitarian than the US for example.
In my experience, bureaucrats flee from accountability the way vampires flee from sunlight.