There wasn’t a job Helene Dederich couldn’t do if you gave her a shot. She was 20 when she got her job off the farm at the Oscar Mayer plant in 1952 in Madison — long hours on the cutting room floor sorting good meat from bad. Later she did laundry and cooked and cleaned for a family whose mother was sick. Her husband Vinnie was the same, working as a machine operator and night cook while going to school for electrical engineering to give their kids a brighter future. He’d go on to help the emerging telecommunications field reach its height.
“This is all I knew, I was a farmer,” Helene, now 94 and my great-aunt, said of her family’s path into the middle class. “I wasn’t scared of any work.”
This is the power of the rural workforce through the generations – and we’re getting ready to wipe it out for good.
For all the talk of how artificial intelligence could replace the knowledge-based jobs of white-collar workers, we’re completely missing the impact on rural America, other than the controversy over where to put data centers. The truth goes much deeper: AI is about to devastate rural America, leading to catastrophic consequences for everyone — higher food prices, a vanishing skills-based labor force just when we’d find ourselves needing it most, and deeper political divisions than ever.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. AI can also lead to a rebirth, if we get the debate about solutions out of Silicon Valley and into the heartland.
Why AI’s rural stakes go beyond the data center debate
To kick that off, let’s show why the stakes are so high. As America scrambles to figure out which jobs AI may make useless, the tech industry is headed toward what’s known as Artificial General Intelligence. AGI will take AI from doing specific tasks exponentially faster than humans, when programmed by humans, to going beyond human reasoning — learning and applying knowledge on its own, with command of all information online.
Tech companies are in a race to accomplish AGI, with executives openly warning of the disruption to workers — while also warning that limiting them will only let hostile countries like China take the lead. The debate over what the government should do is light years behind.
Independent experts like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Daron Acemoglu and David Autor — researchers who are exploring how to achieve “pro-worker” AI and are blunt about AI’s benefits and risks — warn that AGI stands to centralize the control of virtually all human information into too few hands, while companies use it to cut labor costs in an economy requiring productivity over all else.
And this is where the danger lies. Setting AI loose across all human information in search of efficiency alone — abandoning creativity, quality, and other economic values more than we already have — will force our economy further than ever toward fewer and bigger companies.
Every time we’ve made industries endlessly consolidate in our rural economy, we’ve harmed it in ways that affect the rest of America, too. Forcing farms to get big or get out has wiped out 45,000 farms per year for the past century, part of a broader consolidation of the entire food system that has left us with a shaky supply chain – one big link in the food supply chain going down is constantly tanking supply and spiking prices, on top of how battering an industry so hard hampers innovation.
Losing manufacturing jobs and other industry to automation or off-shoring has left many skilled workers without work, or ways to adapt what they can do – banishing them to worse jobs or dependence on government support as they leave the workforce for good. People exiting the workforce while others age or leave rural areas has led to viral workforce decline in counties all over America. All that loss across farming, manufacturing, and all kinds of rural trades has fueled the rural resentment that is one half of our dangerous rural-urban political divide (the other half being urban America ignoring the loss).
Adding AI to this will gut rural America and put these problems — high food prices, declining workforce, and deepening political divisions — on hyperdrive.
AI isn’t the first time we’ve risk our rural workforce
To be fair to the robots (and tech companies making them), history shows humans have a mixed record but we have a chance to learn from it. In Helene’s era, we made climbing into the middle class possible when we turned a rural workforce loose on the booming industrial economy, but we failed to provide enough lasting opportunity near places like where she grew up. The era of Helene and four of her brothers working at Oscar Mayer, living in small towns and growing cities while my grandpa and her other siblings farmed nearby, gave way to another era: of rural communities endlessly losing farms, people, and economic opportunity.
I was part of this ongoing rural flight decades later, learning I had to leave to find opportunity as a writer in journalism then public policy — before returning to my roots and finding our new remote economy meant I could split time between the city and the farm.
The irony of all this is that we could leverage our rural workforce in remarkable ways, if we managed to stop leaving it behind. Rural workers are more accessible than ever in an era where remote work is widely accepted post-COVID. And, those rural workers who do jobs at fixed locations — like construction, or various building trades — have skills that companies will need on into the future. The risk is that we wipe out these workers, sending even more of them to menial jobs or government dependence and leaving them less ready to meet future needs. That’s why it’s so critical that AI should be used to bring ideas, people, and money back into rural areas, not further extract wealth from them.
The good news is we can stop this, if we focus on AI’s impact in the heartland. There are many parts to the solution: Steering AI to develop technological solutions that can support businesses of all sizes and kinds, ensuring it is used to improve worker capabilities rather than replace workers, making sure it rewards individuals for their efforts to use AI rather than siphoning information from them, and putting more money into workers’ pockets during the still-bumpy transition. I outline those solutions – and scenarios they can help prevent – in a second column posting June 9.
Coming June 9: Here’s how we can avoid AI destruction in rural Wisconsin and beyond
Somehow, even though we’ve gotten these transitions wrong so often over the years, talking with Great-Aunt Helene made me feel better. She lived through the shifts from horses to cars and candlelight to electricity, the rise of telecommunications, the birth of the Internet, and more. But that doesn’t mean we can rest easy. When I told Helene about the idea of AI taking over peoples’ jobs, she immediately saw the risk to us all if people lose valuable work.
“I think that’s wrong,” she said. “I don’t know what society’s doing out there.”
Neither do we. But we have a chance to figure it out this time.
Brian Reisinger is an award-winning writer who grew up on a family farm in Sauk County. He contributes columns and videos for the Ideas Lab at the Journal Sentinel, and is the author of “Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer,” which won Book of the Year from the nonpartisan Farm Foundation and other national awards. Reisinger works in public affairs consulting for Wisconsin-based Platform Communications. He splits his time between Sacramento, Calif. — America’s “farm-to-fork capital,” near his wife’s family — and the family farm in Wisconsin. You can find him on Facebook at Brian.Reisinger.3 or at brian-reisinger.com
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: AI threat to Wisconsin’s rural areas is deeper than we think | Opinion
Reporting by Brian Reisinger, Special to Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Brian Reisinger, Special to Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | USA TODAY Network
