Chapter 1
When Our Jobs First Went Away
Chances are youāve already encountered, more than a few times, truly frightening predictions about artificial intelligence and its implications for the future of humankind. The machines are coming and they want your job, at a minimum. Scary stories are easy to find in all the erudite places where the tech visionaries of Silicon Valley and Seattle, the cosmopolitan elite of New York City, and the policy wonks of Washington, DC, convergeāTED Talks, Davos, ideas festivals, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Hollywood films, South by Southwest, Burning Man. The brilliant innovator Elon Musk and the genius theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking have been two of the most quotable and influential purveyors of these AI predictions. AI poses āan existential threatā to civilization, Elon Musk warned a gathering of governors in Rhode Island one summerās day.
When the founder of PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX speaks, I listen. And Muskās words are very much on my mind as the car I drive (not autonomously, not yet) crests a hill in the rural southern piedmont of Virginia where I was born and raised. From here I can almost see home, the fields once carpeted by a stunning shade of lush green tobacco leaves and the roads long ago bustling with workers commuting from profitable textile mills and furniture plants. But that economy is no more. Poverty, unemployment, and frustration are high, not unlike our neighbors across the Blue Ridge Mountains in Appalachia and to the north in the Rust Belt. I am driving between Rustburg, the county seat, and Gladys, an unincorporated farming community where my mom and brother still live.
I left this community, located just down the road from where Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, because even as a kid I could see the bitter end of an economy that used to hum along, and I couldnāt wait to chase my own dreams of building computers and software. But these are still my people, and I love them. Today, as one of the many tech entrepreneurs on the West Coast, my worldview has feet firmly planted in both urban California and rural Southern soil. Iāve come home to test those confident, anxiety-producing warnings about the future of jobs and artificial intelligence that I frequently hear among thought leaders in Silicon Valley, New York City, and DC, to see for myself whether there might be a different story to tell.
Like many, I was moved by J.D. Vanceās description of a hardscrabble life and poverty-as-family-tradition in Hillbilly Elegy. The book got underneath the anger and despair that converted many Democrat-leaning regions of this country to more conservative politics. It provided a narrative unfamiliar to some of my coastal friends trying to understand whatās going on in middle America. This book is about technology, not politics. But if I can better understand how the friends and family I grew up with in Campbell County are faring today, a decade after one economic tidal wave swept through, and in the midst of another, perhaps I can better influence the development of advanced technologies that will soon visit their lives and livelihoods.
I pull off Brookneal Highway, the two-lane main road, into a wide gravel parking lot that looks like a staging area for heavy equipment, next to the old house my friends W. B. and Allan Bass lived in when we were in high school. A sign out front proclaims that Iāve arrived at Bass Sod Farm. The house is now headquarters for their sprawling agricultural operation. Itās just around the corner from my momās house and, in a sign of the times, near a nondescript cinder-block building that houses a CenturyLink hub for high-speed Internet access. Prized deer antlers, a black bearskin, and a stuffed bobcat adorn their conference room, which used to be the family kitchen.
W.B. and Allan were popular back in the day. They always had a nice truck with a gun rack, and were known for their hunting and fishing skill. The Bass family has worked the same plots of Campbell County tobacco land for five generations dating back to the Civil War. Within my lifetime, Barksdale the grandfather, Walter the father, and now W.B. (Walter Barksdale) and brother Allan have worked the land alongside nine seasonal workers, mostly immigrants from Mexico.
Many families in Campbell County used to grow and sell tobacco, but today only two families continue. First came the 1964 surgeon generalās report officially recognizing the health risks of tobacco. At the time, about 42 percent of adults in the United States smoked, compared with about 20 percent today. By 1988, smoking was banned on US flights two hours or less, and ten years later all US carrier flights became smoke-free. A 1991 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that six-year-olds could just as easily recognize Joe Camel as Mickey Mouse. Big change began to come in 1998 when the tobacco industry agreed to a $206 billion master settlement, the largest in US history, with forty-six state attorneys general to resolve lawsuits that sought to recover the Medicaid costs for tobacco-related illnesses. Finally, in 2004, Congress ended a sixty-six-year-old federal price-support program that had maintained tobacco production and prices. With foreign competition and no federal regulation of quotas, tobacco prices plummeted. Tobacco, a major employer in rural Virginia, evaporated.
The Bass family grew brightleaf tobacco, commonly known as Virginia tobacco. With ābrightā you cultivate the leaves only, about eighteen to twenty-two leaves per stalk, for cigarettes. They also sold dark tobacco, which involves cultivating the whole stalk and is used for chewing tobacco and cigars. By 2005 the Bass family saw the writing on the wall for its once valuable operation, and began to transition their land from tobacco to sod, or turf, a grassy product they sell to construction companies for new and refurbished building landscapes, golf courses, and other sports fields. By 2008 they were completely out of tobacco, and today their products are a new shade of greenāBermuda, zoysia, and fescue. They also grow some soybeans.
āPeople gotta eat, but they wonāt always need sod,ā Iām told. Fortunately, they got out of tobacco while the gettinā was still good.
As at any business, the cell phone and PC are ubiquitous at Bass Sod Farm. They also use some automation technology in their heavy machinery, including a Trebro harvester that rolls up the sod, stacks it on a pallet, and ensures minimum waste. It required Allan Bass to take forty hours of training, and he now has put in about three thousand hours of operation. According to Allan, āitās an art and a scienceā to harvest the sod just right. The Bass brothers recently added global positioning satellite (GPS) technology to their sprayers, exponentially increasing their efficiency and effectiveness. That transition is still a work in progress. āWe donāt have it down pat yet,ā Allan admits.
What really bugs them is that technology is not as transparent as it used to be. The problem with self-driving tractors and GPS sprayers is that you canāt see whatās broken, or at least your average farmer canāt. Their biggest worry is not AI, but making sure that the technology they do have is self-healing. āIf something fails, you spend lots of time debugging it.ā And the time Allan spends debugging his farm equipment is a big productivity hit for their small business.
They regard drones, and what I would describe as advanced machine learning or early AI, as something that will be helpful in gathering intelligence on their crops. A drone can take scores of pictures of āhot spotsā on their crops to find irrigation problems, insects, and disease. An AI and drones can be trained to spot most potential calamities and provide an early warning system, likely saving many of the human jobs that would have been lost if the problem went undetected and the crops were ruined. Although they feel their human solution is bestāāWhat weāve got is working. Humans know what to look forāāit is time-consuming and costly for their small workforce to comb through acres of farmlands, looking for minute details. Theyād much rather deploy human capital to expansion, quicker delivery, and product innovation, anything but walking mile after mile.
The Bass boys are optimistic. Business is good, and W.B.ās son chose to remain in Campbell County even though heās become a computer engineer in nearby Lynchburg. The next Industrial Revolution is not far off at Bass Sod Farm.
My next stop is nearby Brookneal, Virginia, to see another friend, Sheri Denton Guthrie, a financial manager at Heritage Hall Nursing Home. Heritage cared for three of my grandparents in their final years. Like at Bass Sod Farm, I want to better understand how AI will one day affect a place I know all too well, a place that millions of baby boomers will also soon know.
Heritage has seventeen homes scattered across rural Virginia. It has sixty residents and as many as eighty staff depending on occupancy. There are nurses, nursing assistants, housekeepers, a medical secretary, an admissions staff, and a director. Sheri manages the homeās books and has an astonishing amount of training on a range of health-care systems, PointClickCare and Toughbook to name a few. Even with all the available technologies, she says itās still too hard. Heritage gets paid based on individual residentsā āRUG scores,ā short for a Resource Utilization Group calculation for Medicare and Medicaid. Staff go around with Toughbooks and log things like minutes of physical, speech, and occupational therapy; a doctorās visit; a mental health consult; an IV; help from the nurse assistants. These services all add up to an overall RUG score for which the nursing home is reimbursed.
Like the Bass brothers, Sheri is less worried about AI and more concerned about mundane things like needing her financial system reports to line up on a printer. A few years ago, hackers stole personal records from their health-care insurance provider, Anthem, so she worries about privacy and security. AI-infused robots could almost certainly be trained to do many tasks in the nursing home, from inputting medical data to providing medications and even treating wounds, though she has one caveat. āFor our generation, yes, but not this generation. Theyād beat the robot with a cane.ā
After a quick stop at the Golden Skillet for fried chicken, lima beans, and iced tea, I hurry over to check in on Hugh E. Williams, who manages a small team of workers at American Plastic Fabricators. Hugh E, as all our classmates know him, is a tall, strongly built man with a red beard that is only beginning to hint at his age with a streak of gray down the middle. Hugh E and I grew up together, going to the same church from the time we were toddlers, and to the same school as teenagers. Heās proud to show me his plant, now located in an abandoned Bassett-Walker textile factory. Started in 1936 as Bassett Knitting Corporation an hour and a half west of Brookneal in Bassett, Virginia, the old mill was part of a storied Southern industry that turned cotton into clothes. Cotton textiles once dominated the Southās economy, but cheaper labor abroad and automation decimated the workforce. This mill in Brookneal closed with little hope of ever reopening.
But a local entrepreneur began this modest company to shape small, precision plastic parts that were needed by a wide ran...
