More!
With fellow panelists @alexisohanian and @packyM at Reindustrialize yesterday talking about "The American Worker in the Age of AI." Here's what I said (or meant to say):
I don't know that all will be smooth for the American worker, but I'm extremely hopeful that America finds a way to keep generating jobs as fast as AI takes them away. By doing more. Way more of everything, but as it relates to us at @Monumental_Labs, way more beauty.
Consider that Rome and Florence at the height of the Renaissance were towns of around 50,000 people. Beauty created per capita was off the charts. We are so far from producing that level of beauty today that the opportunity is boundless.
Enter automation. Automation is a craft multiplier, taking care of enough of the production process to bring cost down significantly and vastly expand the market for beauty.
In the case of Monumental Labs, we automate stone carving robots to do the first 95% of a piece--removing layers of stone--while using human carves for the the final 5%--all the detailed finishing that only a human can do. For every robot we've set up, we've hired 3 carvers, an artist, plus product managers, salespeople etc. Before the robots, most of our craftsmen were not working in stone carving. They worked in adjacent art fields even though they wanted to make a living carving stone. The robots raise the output of human carvers to a point where they can make a living creating sculpture again.
Now that we have the capability to deliver beauty and craft at a reasonable cost (in fact, far lower than it cost during America's architectural heyday in the late 19th and early 20th C.), the next question is: will we be able to expand it enough to make a dent in the beauty gap and the coming jobs gap?
Monumental Labs' solution to this is actually to make entire buildings out of stone again (cut cheaply by robot, reinforced with some steel) to replace reinforced concrete as the default non-combustible building material. Trying to attach stone cladding and decoration to concrete structures is a troublesome, redundant process that doesn't scale. Instead, we use the stone to hold up the building and carve decoration right onto it.
This replacement of old building methods with new will actually mean some potentially big transitions in construction jobs. There will be less need for on-site labor, though more demand for skilled masons (I'll need another thread to get into how this whole dynamic could play out).
What it does mean is that the cost of building structures and facades will fall by over 50% and things like housing will get cheaper. The way to make up for job gaps that arise on a per-square foot basis is to build more. And we now can.
That brings me back to beauty. We could fill huge job shortfalls just by pursuing beauty to the same extent as our Greek, Roman, Renaissance and Gilded Age forebears.
So I believe it's time both government and private individuals have a beauty agenda and take very seriously the role they play as patrons. Governments don't necessarily need to pony up the cash for projects, but they do need to clear the way for beautification projects to happen. The individuals who benefit from the AI boom by generating vast wealth may find that patronage of the arts and crafts is both personally fulfilling and societally beneficial. It's a jobs program, it's a culture program, it's a class war mitigation program. And if done right it will leave the country with wonders that last thousands of years.
The Greeks, the Romans, the Italians of the Renaissance, the titans of the Gilded Age saw patronage of beautiful things as a duty. They were charged with cultivating private "splendor" and public "magnificence" as a way to support craftsmen and build their civilization. I think we should take beauty seriously again today. Beauty just might save us.
