"The War on Normal People (2020)” revisited

Andrew Yang in his book “The War on Normal People”, explores the effect of technology on unemployment and what happens when AI, robotics and automation software will displace millions of jobs. These are exactly the contemporary topics that now rose to prominence in the age of AI. However, the twist is that the book was written in 2020, which was 2 years before the arrival of ChatGPT. This gives us a unique possibility to evaluate how much of the perceived dangers actually took place and gives us a framework to evaluate future risks. 

Truck drivers and self-driving cars

Since AI was not yet really a thing, a prime focus of Andrew Yang was on blue collar jobs. In particular, self driving vehicles were analyzed. Andrew foresaw a boom in self-driving vehicles. Musk had stated that as early as 2019, all new Teslas will be self-driving. 2020 was supposed to be the year of mass adoption, where ride sharing companies expected that half their fleets would be autonomous in 2022. 

In reality in 2026, we are just not there yet. The roads, the regulation and technology are not significantly prepared. In addition, switching to autonomous driving creates an enormous risk for car manufacturers as the liability in accidents largely shifts from the driver to the manufacturer.
However, while self-driving cars remain elusive, there does seem to be a lot of success for self-driving vehicles in more controlled environments. Autonomous warehouses by Amazon and in China are really kicking off. Autonomous delivery robots by Starship are doing well in planned environments like American campuses. In short, we are still going to be getting there, but the road to get there seems to be longer than forecasted. 

The failed prediction of Musk in regards to autonomous cars, does not seem to faze him in making new claims in the field of robotics, with claims that the next Optimus mechanical assistant will hit the private market in 2027.

The collapse of white collar jobs and rise of AI

Andrew Yang was much more accurate with his prediction on AI. Already in 2017, Andrew reviewed an AI written piece for the company J.M. Smucker and found it to be surprisingly readable. Andrew expected the quality of AI written content to improve from “acceptable” to “very good” in the coming years. We can now say that Andrew was correct. 

Andrew already recognized that being displaced by automation is not a question of being a white or blue collar worker, or even cognitive vs manual tasks, but rather routine vs non-routine. At the time Andrew wrote this, Machine Learning already made large strides in image tagging and image recognition and in spam tagging. 

A little fact-check. Andrew wrote that the New York Stock Exchange used to have 5 500 traders on the floor, but it was reduced to 400, due to advanced tracking algorithms. Nowadays according to “The Street”, we see around 300 people. 

The role of humanity

Andrew saw a major problem in the nature of capitalism. Where “normal people” with median incomes start to struggle because of how difficult it is to find work, then business leaders profit based off of the increases in efficiency by automation. 

This problem still seems to persist. In 2026, the rich are still getting richer and the poor are getting more poor. Many job fields seem to be affected by job displacements based off of AI developments and this is likely to endure. Politics rather seems to skew away from the left, where values such as Universal income are being replaced by more aggressive power centered politicians.

After reading “The War on Normal People”, I was left with a douvle feeling. On the one hand feeling some relief that in reality, changes were predicted to happen faster and more dramatically. But on the other hand, we have not solved the problems that Andrew has pointed out and current developments seem to further worsen issues in job displacement.

I am curious how the future of technology will look in 2035 and what the status of the predictions will be.