Nathaniel Whittemore

The study showed that people anticipating downward mobility enter what they call a domain of loss.

where they become risk-seeking and susceptible to mobilization for violence.

I do not have to spell this out for an audience as smart as you to demonstrate how this finding is directly relevant to AI anxiety.

The threat, of course, is not just that people are poor today, but that they believe AI will make them poorer tomorrow.

I would point once again to the fact that all of the AI CEOs seem to make it their business to go on new podcasts every week to talk about how many people are going to lose their jobs.

Now the question becomes, what can be done about this?

Well, one thing that the research shows does not work is just trying to make people like each other more.

In a comprehensive 2023 review for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Rachel Kleinfeld found that reducing effective polarization does not reduce support for political violence.

In other words, lab interventions that successfully made partisans feel warmer towards each other had zero effect on attitudes towards violence.

In other words, you cannot kumbaya your way out of this.

So what does work?

The first and perhaps most important is political efficacy.

In short, when aggrieved individuals perceive that democratic channels work, they're less likely to support violence.

If they think that their political participation doesn't matter, they are more likely to support violence.

In AI land, if people perceive that AI companies will simply lobby against regulation at all turns and constantly get their way, that is going to feed perception that democratic recourse is unavailable.

Second, the inverse of the idea that poor prospects rather than current inequality motivates political violence is that you have to address economic trajectory, policies then that credibly improve people's economic outlook, whether that's job retraining with real placement, housing affordability measures, portable benefits, whatever it is that actually changes perception of future prospects can reduce the sense of downward mobility that fuels radicalization.

Now, to some, that might suggest, let's get the UBI train rolling, right?

Not so fast.

Jeremy Gingis from the New School offers a critical warning.

In his study, The Moral Logic of Political Violence, he found that when sacred values are at stake, material incentives to prevent violence can backfire.