Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University and a Tarbell fellow.
Artificial intelligence will eliminate jobs.
Companies may not need as many workers as AI increases productivity. Others may simply be swapped out for automated systems. Call it what you want — displacement, replacement or elimination — but the outcome is the same: stagnant, struggling communities. The open question is whether we will learn from mistakes. Will we proactively take steps to support the communities most likely to bear the cost of “innovation.”
We’ve seen what happens when communities experience sustained loss of meaningful work. Globalization caused more than 70,000 factories to close and 5 million manufacturing workers to look for new jobs. Those forced to find work elsewhere rarely found a good substitute. The remaining jobs usually paid less, provided fewer benefits and afforded less security in comparison to a union job at a factory, for example.
Economists assumed that those workers would eventually move to more lucrative pastures and find the areas with more economic vibrancy. Workers stayed put. It’s hard to leave your pasture, when it’s the place you, your family and your community have long called home. This tendency to stay put, though, created a difficult reality. Suddenly, whole communities found their economic well-being on the decline. That’s a recipe for unrest.
The same story played out in my home state, Oregon. New technology and policies rendered the timber industry a dying trade. Residents of towns like Mill City, a timber town through and through, didn’t jointly march to a new area but understandably stayed where their families had established deep roots.
It’s time to stop assuming that people will give up on their communities. Home is much more than just a job. So when AI eliminates jobs, what safeguards will be in place so that people can remain in their communities and find other ways to thrive?
I don’t have a full answer to that question, but there’s at least one safeguard that deserves consideration: a rainy day fund. We don’t know when, where and how rapidly AI will upend a community’s economic well-being. That’s why we need to create a support fund that can help folks who suddenly find themselves with no good options. This would mark an improvement on unemployment because it would be specifically targeted to assist those on the losing end of our AI gamble and should be available to both laborers and local governments.
The AI companies responsible for prioritizing their pursuit of artificial general intelligence — AI systems with human-level capabilities — over community stability should front the costs of that fund. Congress can and should tax the companies actively inducing a new wave of displacement.
The fund should be dispersed upon any sizable disruption to a specific industry or sector. Both cities and workers could apply for support to weather economic doldrums and find new ways to thrive. Such support helped us all get through Covid. A similar strategy might help mitigate the worst-case scenarios associated with AI.
The potential downsides of this fund are worth the certain benefits of more resilient communities. A tax or penalty on AI would hinder the ability of AI companies to develop and deploy AI as quickly as possible. The specific allocation of that revenue to a rainy day fund might also nudge companies to avoid creating models likely to disrupt various professions. That’s all fine by me. We have survived centuries without AI, there’s no need for the latest and greatest model to come as soon as possible, especially given the immense costs of that pace of innovation.
Now is the time for Congress to enact such a proposal. Following the election, we may find Congress to be even more gridlocked and fragmented than before. Elected officials should welcome the chance to tell their constituents about a policy to bolster their economic prospects.
The urgency to address the job displacement caused by AI cannot be overstated. By establishing a rainy day fund, taxing AI companies to support displaced workers and exploring additional policies to maintain community stability, we can mitigate the adverse effects of rapid technological advancement. Congress must prioritize the well-being of communities over the relentless pursuit of AI innovation. Doing so will not only knit a stronger social fabric but also ensure AI develops in line with the public interest.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.