Former Obama official on AI anxiety and the depression nobody remembers — and the training model that gives him hope

Imagine one in five Americans out of work, unemployment jumping from 3% to 18% in just two years as machine-replaced Americans went looking for work. Soup kitchens lining the streets of every major city. Whole states even harder hit: over a third of New York workers unemployed, nearly half in Michigan.

That was America in 1893 — not the Great Depression, but the one that came before it. The proximate triggers were financial: a railroad bubble that burst, a run on gold reserves, bank failures cascading across the country. But the kindling had been laid over decades. 

The violent lurch from an agricultural economy to an industrial one had uprooted millions: Workers flooded cities unprepared to house and care for them, and the migration left rural America in a prolonged slump long before the panic hit. Frustrated, unemployed Americans marched on Washington for the first time ever, demanding a jobs bill. Technological disruption didn’t cause the Depression directly, but established the conditions that made catastrophe, when it came, so devastating and so hard to escape.

With so many now predicting yet another Depression-level event, the social and economic devastation of the “forgotten depression” is eerily instructive. We are again at the doorsteps of a transition we do not fully understand, but this time, a technological transformation is throwing gas on a fire that is already alight. 

Because at the dawn of the AI era, the economic ladder is already broken. If you were........

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