His characterization is the privilege.
Most people are left with no choice but to adapt or parish. The fact he is contemplating optionally in the most profound automation in the industry is a form of a.. privilege.
AI optimism is a class privilege
61–70 of 145 posts
Re: AI optimism is a class privilege
#62I disagree with most of this article. Disclaimer: I'm a junior engineer and I believe both that: 1. AI is going to take my job, 2. AI is going to do incredible good for the world. I don't see how these are distinct. It's a technology shift, of course it's going to make certain jobs obsolete - that's how technology shifts work. I'm not going to go through every quote I disagree with, but unlike some AI negativity disc…
Average labour hours in a year dramatically increased with the Industrial Revolution.
They would only decrease much later, after a long period of social conflict, economic growth, and technological progress.
During the early phase of the Industrial Revolution (roughly 1760–1850):
Agricultural workers who once labored seasonally were pushed into factory schedules of 12–16 hours per day, 6 days per week.
Annual labor hours often exceeded 3,000 hours per year per worker.
This was not because work became harder physically, but because capital-intensive machinery became expensive and had to run continuously to be profitable.
Time discipline replaced task-based work. Before industrialization, a farmer might stop when tasks were done; factory workers had fixed shifts.
This trend persisted into the late 19th century.
Re: AI optimism is a class privilege
#63"Class privilege" doesn't go far enough. If the class war is a war then AI may be its Manhattan project: a weapon that destroys the value of, and the ruling elite's need for, labor.
I continue to be shocked by the way people (with platforms) talk up to the (speculative) line where AI replaces most or all jobs, and then lamely suggest that this will be bad for the people who've lost their jobs because they will be poor, or something. No. What actually happens in that scenario is that money ceases to have value, at least in the way we currently understand it to. That scenario will produce a handful of monsters—sociopathic trillionaire brains encysted in layers of automation and automated production—that will crave more resources, more land, more power, and they will fight each other by various means for those things, and the rest of us will be at best in the way.
This scenario is not a given, because it's not obvious that AI can become this capable in the near term where the stage is set for such a profoundly lopsided outcome, but you can bet these people are thinking about it now, if not talking about it, if not materially preparing for it. And they are, indeed, the only people with reason to feel optimistic about it.
Re: AI optimism is a class privilege
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
This assumes every decision-maker is a rational actor. Just today an executive was rambling about "quantum-empowered AI". These are the people who take decisions about firing workers. It is entirely possible that AI will replace many jobs while being useless (at achieving what those workers do). At least in the short-medium period. We would live in a post-scarcity utopia if big economic decisions were taken based on…
I'm interested in how you can tell an industry-wide job displacement story about AI, where AI isn't actually doing the job, that isn't a just-so story.
If you wanted to tell such a story, you’d have to find examples of companies spending bazillions on new AI tooling, but failing to hit their top level OKRs. I suspect there will be at least a few of these by the end of 2026 - even a great technology can seem like an abacus in the hands of a disorganized and slow moving org.
Re: AI optimism is a class privilege
#65It seems like the author hasn't really used the latest models, I wrote my last line of code about a month ago after 20+ years coding. Claude Code can do it for me, better faster and never gets tired etc. Yes I have to keep it on leash but humans coding is over, unless its to learn or for fun. Actually it's the lower classes that will escape the longest from AI replacing their jobs, unskilled physical work will remain…
The new robot demos from Unitree make me wonder how many classes of unskilled labor are about to be automated (garbage collection, laundry & dishes, pothole repairs, last mile delivery, simple food preparation…) Skilled labor still has some legs.
I don't see any humanoid robots around at the moment, whereas a huge number of knowledge based workplaces use non-embodied AI now every day.
Re: AI optimism is a class privilege
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
The set of people who believe the automobile (or the Internet) are net negatives taken as a whole for society is extremely small, for good reason
Let's refine terms - internal combustion engine driven automobiles have lead to lead poisoning, air pollution, and CO2 emissions.
The automobile on its own was actually far less polluting than the horse wrt. air quality. It's just that there's a whole lot more of the former than there ever was of the latter. Even wrt. climate change, it turns out that horses produce methane emissions which are far worse for the climate than carbon dioxide.
Re: AI optimism is a class privilege
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
This assumes every decision-maker is a rational actor. Just today an executive was rambling about "quantum-empowered AI". These are the people who take decisions about firing workers. It is entirely possible that AI will replace many jobs while being useless (at achieving what those workers do). At least in the short-medium period. We would live in a post-scarcity utopia if big economic decisions were taken based on…
Seems to be what is happening in a lot of the places it's encroaching. AI journalism is strictly worse than having a human research and write the text, but it's also orders of magnitude much cheaper. You see prompt fragments and other blatant AI artifacts in news articles almost every day. So we get newspapers that have the same shape as they used to, but that don't fulfill their purpose. That's a development that wa…
In retrospect, it was crazy hearing stories about how SF UX designers would be paid $250 to essentially do what Figma does now.
Re: AI optimism is a class privilege
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm interested in how you can tell an industry-wide job displacement story about AI, where AI isn't actually doing the job, that isn't a just-so story.
If you wanted to tell such a story, you’d have to find examples of companies spending bazillions on new AI tooling, but failing to hit their top level OKRs. I suspect there will be at least a few of these by the end of 2026 - even a great technology can seem like an abacus in the hands of a disorganized and slow moving org.
The story only matters if it produces an industry-wide displacement in jobs. Failed billion-dollar IT projects are not a new thing, and don't disrupt the entire labor market.
To be clear: I'm not claiming that AI rollouts won't be billion-dollar failed IT projects! They very well could be. But if that's the case, they aren't going to disrupt the labor market.
Again: you have to pick a lane with the pessimism. Both lanes are valid. I buy neither of them. But recognize a coherent argument when I see one. This, however, isn't one.
Re: AI optimism is a class privilege
#69(I feel that I write a comment like this every few years) The author catalog of harms is real. But it's worth noting that nearly identical catalogs were compiled for every major technological shift in modern history. The Internet destroyed print journalism, local retail, and enabled cyberbullying and mass surveillance. If we applied the same framework used here, Internet optimism in 2005 was also a form of "class pri…
> But it's worth noting that nearly identical catalogs were compiled for every major technological shift in modern history.
And it has been... quite a correct view? In the past few decades the US cranked up its Gini index from 0.35 to ~0.5, successfully eliminated single-earner housebuyers[0]. It's natural to assume the current technology shift will eliminate double-earner housebuyers too. The next one would probably eliminate PC-buyers if we're lucky!
[0]: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/02/12/the-decli...
Re: AI optimism is a class privilege
#70So the problem here is this isn't an article about AI. When the Luddities broke machines and burned the buildings that held them it wasn't because they hated machines (well at least initially). It's because they hated starving in the streets. This is just a continuing part of the class war that has been going on since humanity started writing. Now, the only thing that might make this different is class/capital may ha…
We are at a fork in the road with lots of potential darkness, but simply thinking any old social safety net is going to work is not going to cut it. Nets can be, and generally are, used to capture.
An interesting multi-pronged approach is post labor economics which is being promoted by David Shapiro: https://www.youtube.com/@DaveShap
The basic premise is that currently we have households being supported by labor, capital, and transfers. With labor largely going away, the leaves capital and transfers. Relying on transfers alone will lead to ownership of the people by government. So we have to find ways to generate way more distributed capital ownership by the masses. This is what he plans, discusses, and promotes.