AI is not good enough to replace you at work, and yet, it might soon be the reason you lose your job. At first glance, this seems contradictory. How can humans be replaced by substandard systems that hallucinate, plagiarise, and fumble nuance? What mechanisms of our society and economy will facilitate this potential catastrophe
Recap: You will pay for the failures of the elite
In Part 1 of this essay, I argued that corporate leaders, caught in cycles of hype and market pressures, can mis-allocate capital on a massive scale. When their bets fail, they scramble to pacify Wall Street through mass layoffs. It was this familiar pattern that we saw after the pandemic’s ‘new normal’ narrative collapsed. Corporate leaders realised that they had over-invested in expectation of permanent digital acceleration, and saved their skins by firing thousands of workers. Executives messed up, and workers paid the price.
In Part 2, we will explore THREE additional mechanisms through which AI can be dangerous even if it delivers poor results. This includes the one scenario that might actually make our lives better.
Mechanism #2: Slop will be supreme
It is tempting to believe that consumers will reject low-quality, AI-generated products. Surely audiences will not tolerate an endless stream of synthetic writing, derivative art, and automated entertainment. Surely ‘slop’ cannot win.
But markets do not optimize for excellence. They optimize for price, convenience, and availability. Corporations are well practiced at the art of reducing quality while grabbing ever larger stacks of our cash. Whether shopping on Amazon or searching on Google, we are met with an experience that is increasingly dominated by ads and listings with questionable authenticity. We have seen ride sharing services get less reliable, and social media feeds have become so awful that I find myself nostalgic for the good ol’ days of Facebook. Cory Doctorow literally wrote a book on this topic called ‘Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It’.
Corporations have a tried-and-tested playbook to bait users, build a monopoly, and then let services degrade while squeezing out as much profit as possible from customers, suppliers, and if possible – the government.
If you are not sure about this, try a quick thought experiment on yourself. What if the music, movies or video games that you like get worse, but … they also become less expensive? Which is likely to sell more – a deep and sprawling hand crafted game that costs $100, or a similar game with inferior, derivative art, that costs only $10?
On the other side of the market are the creators: writers, designers, illustrators, developers, musicians – people whose livelihoods depend on producing original work. The more consumers accept slop, the greater pressure it puts on creators, driving many of them out of jobs and out of business, making us even more reliant on AI. The result is a feedback loop. As more creators exit, human-made alternatives become rarer and more expensive, reinforcing reliance on automation. By the time this vicious cycle runs out of steam, we might find that human creativity is reduced to a boutique luxury like mechanical watches or handwritten letters.
Mechanism #3: Fired twice and forgotten
There is a comforting counterargument: firms cannot eliminate too many jobs, because workers are also consumers. If people don’t have jobs to earn money, then is the corporate world shooting itself in the foot by destroying jobs in the name of AI? Surely, corporations will not saw off the branch on which they sit.
Unfortunately, your value as a consumer may not be as high as you think. This video by ‘How Money Works’ titled ‘Why you don’t matter’ is a great way to explain this. Do watch the video, but the gist is that company profits are increasingly coming from a small segment of financial elites, meaning that you represent an increasingly negligible ‘value to shareholders’.
One of the popular concepts we learn in business school is customer segmentation, where you identify high-value customers, extract maximum profit by serving them, and ‘fire’ the customers at the bottom who have the least impact on your earnings.
So you are more likely to be fired from your job, because you are more likely to be fired as a consumer.
Mechanism #4: Utopian flowers budding in a dystopian dumpster
Enough of doom, let us talk about the small sliver of hope amidst the gloom. Could there possibly be a ‘good’ reason to lose a job? Sure – if you did not need a job in the first place. In today’s economy, the vast majority of people need to work in order to provide for themselves and their families. Keep in mind though, that the economy is merely a system of distributing resources to meet the needs of people. Traditionally, we have needed a human workforce to produce goods and services, and a human marketplace to price and allocate what was produced. AI could replace both.
A utopian – but very plausible – scenario is that AI ushers in an era of abundance where we produce and receive everything we need, with no reliance on labour or management.
In such a scenario, the downsizing of labour would not be a deprivation, but a liberation. People would not work to survive, but to push past the cutting edges of our technology, to transcend mundane experiences through art, and to dive further and deeper to understand the universe and understand ourselves.
AI will be as good as you and I
The big risk of the AI age may not be that machines surpass humans. It may be that they are flawed but economically convenient, and we reorganise our institutions around their mediocrity, decimating work and the livelihoods of billions. Or perhaps we harness AI to serve the needs of people across all sections of society, and collectively climb a few more rungs of the civilisational ladder. One way or the other, disruption is coming. We need to demonstrate agency, demand accountability, and ensure that the disruption creates minimal harm and brings the most widespread benefits for generations to come.
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