Chances are you’ve 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, converge—TED 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 “an existential threat” to civilization, Elon Musk warned a gathering of governors in Rhode Island one summer’s day.
When the founder of PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX speaks, I listen. And Musk’s 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 couldn’t 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. I’ve 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. Vance’s 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 what’s 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 I’ve arrived at Bass Sod Farm. The house is now headquarters for their sprawling agricultural operation. It’s just around the corner from my mom’s 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 general’s 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 “bright” 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 green—Bermuda, zoysia, and fescue. They also grow some soybeans.
“People gotta eat, but they won’t always need sod,” I’m told. Fortunately, they got out of tobacco while the gettin’ 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, “it’s an art and a science” 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. “We don’t have it down pat yet,” 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 can’t see what’s broken, or at least your average farmer can’t. Their biggest worry is not AI, but making sure that the technology they do have is self-healing. “If something fails, you spend lots of time debugging it.” 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 “hot spots” 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 best—“What we’ve got is working. Humans know what to look for”—it is time-consuming and costly for their small workforce to comb through acres of farmlands, looking for minute details. They’d 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.’s son chose to remain in Campbell County even though he’s 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 home’s 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 it’s still too hard. Heritage gets paid based on individual residents’ “RUG scores,” 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 doctor’s 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. “For our generation, yes, but not this generation. They’d beat the robot with a cane.”
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. He’s 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 South’s 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 range of customers, from theme parks to defense contractors. The business, essentially a job shop, was hit hard by the financial crisis of 2008, but began to grow again in the aftermath by offering competitive pricing on polyethylene and high-density plastics fabrication. With more than twenty employees, needing a larger space, they took over the defunct textile mill. The day I visited, one of the workers was using a sophisticated milling machine controlled by a computer to create an intricate piece for Disneyland’s Jumpin’ Jellyfish ride. Disney sent Hugh E the specifications, they programmed the machine, and voilà, one by one these young workers carve plastic into industrial works of art. A machinist diploma from Southside Virginia Community College and a little on-the-job training can land a well-paying job in a small town that was once counted out.
As I’ve witnessed firsthand, and as many working Americans have experienced personally, manufacturing jobs have been disappearing for decades now, moving overseas where things can be built cheaper. What I saw in Brookneal and what’s happening across the country, in rural and urban settings alike, is new manufacturing jobs being created because AI, robotics, and advanced automation are becoming more capable and cheaper every day, making it feasible to build things in the United States and other markets where labor costs are high. As automation becomes cheaper and more powerful, it levels the playing field for small companies, allowing them to lower their unit costs of production and to become more competitive, consequently allowing them to grow their businesses and create more and higher-paying jobs.
This pattern of combining the best of human skill with the best of automation can result in incredible prosperity. Look no further than Germany’s Mittelstand, small- and medium-size enterprises generating less than 50 million euro in revenue annually, which collectively account for 99.6 percent of German companies, 60 percent of jobs, and over half of Germany’s gross domestic product.5 These companies are ingenious at finding narrow but valuable markets to serve, then using highly skilled labor and advanced automation to produce high-quality products extremely efficiently. My friend Hugh E’s employer would be in the Mittelstand, along with 3.3 million others, if it were located in Germany.
Microsoft data indicate that manufacturing is among the fastest-growing segments for AI talent and skills. According to LinkedIn, AI skills increased 190 percent between 2015 and 2017.6 The idea of creating new, skilled, well-paying manufacturing jobs in rural Brookneal would have been implausible a couple of decades ago. Now it is reality. That’s good news. And the better news is that the underlying automation trend will continue to provide ever more powerful, ever cheaper technology that will create even more opportunities for entrepreneurs and workers alike, in both rural and urban America.
In the future, it’s likely that some of this automation will be able to do work that humans are doing today. That’s a good thing. That’s what automation has been doing for centuries. From the vantage point of the developed world in the early twenty-first century, it means more business and more jobs can be repatriated from overseas, that we can build new businesses with new jobs in the future that would be economically infeasible or technically impossible today, and that we all get higher-quality, cheaper, more innovative goods and services that will improve our quality of life. It’s likely that AI can help us equalize some of the inequities that have come as a result of late-twentieth-century global free trade. It’s far less likely that we will achieve AI and robotics anytime soon that are capable of completely replacing human workers in arbitrary manufacturing and service jobs. And that’s especially true if we choose to place our thumb on the scale and deliberately pursue the former path versus the latter.
In the face of increasingly wild hypothetical scenarios about AI’s potential dominance over humans, the reality of what AI is capable of now, and will be capable of in the near future, is more humbling. For example, Daniela Hernandez of the Wall Street Journal attended a government-sponsored contest for intelligent robots in 2017. One by one, each robot was stumped by an unlocked door. One was able to wrap its mechanical fingers around the doorknob and open it, but was flummoxed by a slight breeze that kept blowing the door shut. An ongoing “Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence” at Stanford University found in its 2016 report that while computers were becoming more capable at highly specific tasks, a robot takeover is pretty unlikely. “Contrary to the more fantastic predictions for AI in the popular press, the Study Panel found no cause for concern that AI is an imminent threat to humankind. No machines with self-sustaining long-term goals and intent have been developed, nor are they likely to be developed in the near future.” If society approaches AI with a more open mind, the authors wrote, technologies emerging from the field could profoundly transform society for the better in the coming decades. Even though AI is progressing incredibly quickly, we still have a way to go before it is able to dramatically transform the world . . . for good or ill.
My visits with the Bass brothers, Sheri, and Hugh E remind me that sharp intellect and attention to detail and optimism, rooted in today’s tech reality, remain strong among blue-collar, mid-skilled rural—and I suspect Rust Belt—leaders and entrepreneurs. I firmly believe AI, robotics, drones, and data will continue to augment, not replace, workers in communities like Gladys and Brookneal for generations to come. Every week of every year I sit in product demonstrations and strategy sessions on AI development. Whether it’s in my role at Microsoft or as an investor in Silicon Valley, I am increasingly assured that AI will ultimately be about human empowerment, not displacement.
As the autumn darkness descends on Campbell County, I turn the car around and head back to Mom’s house, just as I did so many times as a kid. I’ve been inspired by my old friends. That night, as sleep comes slowly, I imagine what I could do here to create jobs and help rebuild the local economy.
The next morning, I am up early and head an hour south to the little town of Boydton, Virginia, in Mecklenburg County near the North Carolina border. I am going to visit the Microsoft cloud, or at least where part of it is housed in one of the world’s largest data centers in the world. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, a term economists have used to describe the coming age of AI, is well underway in rural Virginia. (We’ve been a hotbed for revolutionaries for centuries.) Not long ago, Microsoft and Facebook completed a joint venture that landed a powerful transatlantic data cable just to the east in Norfolk, Virginia. This cable, coupled with data centers like Boydton, is sparking a new economy in the Old South. I want to see for myself these building blocks for the future of data and AI—a massive example of technology upskilling rural workers and creating jobs for the future.
My drive meanders alongside old nineteenth-century railroads, through farmland, and past nondescript historical landmarks of revolutions past. Each town center along the way features the statue of a soldier, head bowed mourning the losses of tragic conflicts. Unemployment in the area hovers around 6 percent, but it reached as high as 13 percent just before Microsoft built its data center.
Once you arrive in Mecklenburg, the data center comes up quickly on your right. As I write this book, it is Microsoft’s largest data center, with acres of computers organized into near-endless, neatly aligned aisles. These centers run a big chunk of the world’s digital infrastructure, but they are largely invisible to anyone driving by. Miss it, like I did, and you must do a quick U-turn at the “Welcome to Boydton” sign. I stopped in front to snap a photo, and suddenly out of nowhere a young Virginia state trooper pulled up behind me, lights flashing, to offer his help.
I found my way to the data center by turning left on Prison Road. Had I turned right I would have found a large vacant field where Boydton’s former largest employer used to reside—a federal maximum-security prison, closed a few years ago for obsolescence.
Once I passed through an elaborate security check, the center’s director greeted me in the lobby and escorted me to a large conference room where a video was already playing, shot from a drone, to provide an overview of the center’s vastness. He briefed me on the history and operations of the data center, and then invited a half-dozen employees, all locals, to join us for a lunch delivered by a nearby diner.
The five-hundred-acre data center is surrounded by three thousand open acres of timberland—lots of space to grow. And that is the plan. Already, local-based construction workers have built twenty physical data centers that serve Microsoft cloud products like Bing, Azure, and Office 365. Our two power substations (100 megawatts and 128 megawatts) make Microsoft the largest power consumer in the region.
Like Hugh E’s company the previous day in Brookneal, Mecklenburg was frantically looking for a relocation opportunity after the 2008 financial crisis. The prison was closing, and times looked very unstable. But the county had plenty of surplus land, nuclear and hydro power, and an aggressive county commissioner. U.S. News & World Report came to Boydton as part of its reporting on the Great Recession. Its headline was “A Small Town That Refuses to Die.” It was founded in the 1700s.
Ironically, it was money from the settlement of tobacco lawsuits that the Commonwealth of Virginia made available to county commissioners to attract new jobs. When Microsoft expressed interest in Boydton for its data center, the county offered the land for $1 along with tax incentives in exchange for the jobs and taxes Microsoft would pay. Back in 2009 when the company went to the building inspector for a permit, the Mecklenburg county administrator simply took out a piece of stationery and signed it.
Today Microsoft employs 430 people in Boydton. But hiring skilled workers has been a challenge. Trained IT technicians do not want to relocate from the cities. And until just recently the locals have not had the inclination or a place to train.
One of the workers I had lunch with, Nathan Hamm, learned this the hard way. He set up a Microsoft booth at nearby Bluestone High School’s job fair. But it was an epic failure. Not one of the soon-to-be graduating seniors stopped by to investigate a career at the data center. Dejected, Nathan packed up his cheerful recruiting materials and headed for the parking lot. A part-time rancher and father of eight, Nathan lived just down the road from the data center and had recently joined Microsoft, first as a vendor and now as an employee. He was asked by his manager—a Chicago transplant—to go out into the community and recruit locals with the qualifications (or a willingness to get them) to join the IT group inside the data center. Demand for the cloud services provided by the data center was growing dramatically. The help-wanted sign was being waved frantically, but applications were scant.
Just as Nathan was about to reach his car, a senior who had not even bothered going to the job fair recognized him and asked how he could apply to work at Microsoft.
“You’ve got to get qualified,” Nathan told him.
“How do I do that?”
“Don’t know, but I’ll find out.”
The student’s question led Nathan to Southside Virginia Community College, where he convinced a reluctant administration to add CompTIA technical certifications like A+, Security+, and Cloud+—training that could land the entire graduating class a good job at Microsoft’s data center. Unfortunately, it’s often harder than just making training available to get people trained for the opportunities that many of us can so easily see. Many students are accustomed to following in the footsteps of their parents, working in the fields and for the businesses that support the farm economy in southern Virginia. High-tech data centers are unfamiliar. Even though the jobs and the training are there to provide full employment for the graduates at Bluestone and Park View, another nearby high school, many students face a difficult job market without tech skills.
To underscore that challenge, the data center’s director told me he stopped in a café for lunch one afternoon, and the waitress asked him what Microsoft was doing on that giant property. She told him that prisons provide a lot of jobs for locals, and she seemed perplexed by the very idea of a data center. The director turned to her and said, “Well, a data center is sort of like a prison, only instead of prisoners we protect your data, lots of data.” With a healthy dose of skepticism, she flashed a smile and walked away.
The tension between the new jobs that are coming and the old comfortable ones can be felt everywhere. That same year, I overheard the director of a data center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, tell his local team that the region’s oil, gas, and coal are dead.
“It’s time the kids in this area understand that tech jobs are the future,” he lectured.
“Ooh,” one of the mid-skilled workers responded, not sure he agreed.
And therein lies a profound tension. If you are a graduating high school student, oil, gas, and coal jobs around Cheyenne will pay upward of $60,000 right out of school, I was told. But they are heavy-labor jobs, like working on an oil rig, that require little additional education and, over time, will pay little more than the initial offer. Jobs built around extracting diminished natural resources also lack the long horizon of other industries. Awakening to this future and preparing for it are essential.