In six months, a year, or two, from now, the first wave of AI-made layoffs is going to hit the economy. A whole lot of execs, having figured out that a whole lot of people are beginning to use AI to do their jobs, are going to dispense with the middleman. They’re not going to care very much if the resulting work — writing copy, reviewing documents, forming relationships — is done with little care, and less quality. They’re just going to see the dollar signs.
And then what? Because we’re already in an economy where people are stretched so thin that they’re using buy now, pay later to pay for groceries. That’s a last resort. They’re maxed out in every other way. They’ve tapped out their “credit,” their incomes have cratered in real terms relative to eye-watering inflation, they have no real resources left. What happens you take an economy stretched that thin…and pull? It breaks. Those layoffs will lead to delinquencies and bad debt which will cause bank failures, which will require the classic sequence of bailouts, shrunken public services, and lower investment. And then we’ll be in the first economic AI crash — right when it’s supposed to be booming.
Those jobs? They’re never coming back. A hole will have been ripped in the economy. You can already see glimmers of what those jobs are — not really jobs, entire fields and industries will be decimated, and already are. Those who are proficient in manipulating AI think they’re clever for holding down four, five, six jobs at once — but the flip side of the coin is that they’re taking them from other people. You can see the writing on the wall. Many forms of pink-collar work? Toast. Clerical work, organizational work, secretarial slash assistant style work. And then you can go up the ladder. Graphic designers and musicians? Good luck, you’re going to need it. Writers (shudder) and publishers and editors? LOL. All the way up to programmers, who used to be, not so long ago, the economy’s newest and most in-demand profession. We can keep going, almost endlessly. Therapists? Check. Doctors — GPs? Eventually.
Even…all those executives themselves…who are going to fire today’s pink-collar masses? Probably. And from there, you begin to see the scale and scope of the problem.
It’s not that AI’s going to “kill us all.” We’re doing a pretty good job of that, in case you haven’t noticed. But it is that AI is going to rip away from us the the three things that we value most. Our economies, human interaction, and in the end, democracy.
I’ve taken you through the first, just a little bit. Let’s consider the second, human interaction. What are people doing with AI? One major use of it is to, LOL, replace actual human relationships. There’s a funny and great article by Taylor Lorenz, just today, on how AI datings apps are becoming popular, even if their results are creepy and weird so far. Once upon a time, internet dating itself was a little weird. Now, it’s ubiquitous. Maybe you see the point here. Then there’s the even creepier Replika, which wants to make you a full AI…girlfriend…boyfriend…just a friend…though of course if you want to get romantic, meaning sexual, well, that’s a premium service, sir, ma’am.
These are extreme examples which won’t seem so extreme in the not-so-distant future. You can see the push to replace real human relationships gathering real force and momentum now. Let’s take the example of all those clever guys using AI to impersonate a person having a job. The AI’s the one talking to their colleagues, co-workers, juniors, boss, really, which is the point of using it to draft not just the “work” itself, but correspondence, communications, emails, even chats. That’s a simple example of the way AI will impact human relationships.
More and more of our relationships will become AI-mediated ones. That means that instead of a direct you-to-me connection, there’ll be an AI in the middle. Meaning, a computer program which tells us what to say, do, think, want, know, request, desire. Let’s go back to the AI dating example, because there, it’s incredibly clear to see — before there was a human-to-human connection. Now, there’s an AI in the middle. And it’s dictating terms, precisely because that’s the kind of interaction that’s awkward, uncomfortable, challenging, demanding. So it’ll tell you what to say, what to think, how to behave, when to say it.
To say that we stand to lose human relationships themselves is an incredibly creepy thing to have to write. It’s never really happened before in history. But whose fault is it? You see, the problem in the examples above isn’t just AI — it’s us. I could tell all these young people what the older me knows. Hey, guys, these things are like this for a reason. Good books are hard to read for a reason. Dates are fraught for a reason. Meaningful work is hard for a reason. And real relationships? LOL, they’re even harder than all those. For a reason. That reason is to expand us, enlighten us, lift us up, and that’s not easy, precisely because we ourselves often resist it.
Why do we need a great book? The moral of the story can be condensed into one sentence, after all, always. We need great books because we don’t just need the one-sentence summary. We need to be taught not just how to really understand it, through a sense of direct personal experience, but often, we need a ripping story around it, just to get us, deadened, weary, dulled, to engage with the damned thing in the first place.
You have a relationship with a great book. I know you do, and you know you do. You think of it as a friend, a mentor, a teacher, a kindred spirit. Think of the way that you adore your favorite books, cherishing them. That is because you have a relationship with them. But in the Age of AI? That relationship will, increasingly, be a mediated one. AI will be the medium through which human beings experience…
Everything. Each other. Knowledge. And other people’s experience, too. Hey, AI, can you summarize Sophocles for me? Yes, Umair. A man blinds himself after sleeping with his own mother. Thanks! Wow, that sounds dumb! Why have people even read that for thousands of years! And so instead of a having a relationship with all this — history, time, hubris, knowledge, all those lives making all those mistakes — now you have a mediated thing that’s a warped shadow of its former self. And it’s a pallid one. It’s twisted, creepy, and above all, tiny.
You see, with people? With great books? Great songs? Paintings? Even theorems, equations, philosophies? Doesn’t matter. We can have relationships with all those things. Intense and deep and profound ones. One that last a lifetime. But…
AI’s job is not to enrich us in any way. It is to impoverish us. I think this point needs to made, and made fully and well. AI’s entire purpose is to impoverish us. It is to replace the great and grand and challenging experiences of being human, from books to people to knowledge to relationships with all those…with condensed, abbreviated, shortened, easier to digest summaries.
How do all those clever guys working five jobs thanks to AI get it done? Well, AI condenses, summarizes, abbreviates tasks for them. And in this case, there’s nothing wrong with it — these fields are dead, anyways, the axe is about to fall, and this time, it’ll be final, like we discussed above. But in this example you can see what AI really does.
Let’s go back to dating, to make it clearer. When you’re a young guy, approaching women is intimidating, confusing, and panic-inducing. Sure, you can pretend it’s not, but it is. And there are all these older dudes telling you the same thing: “just be yourself! Chill! Relax! Line? You don’t need a line, just…go with the flow!” And because you’re so panicked, well, you don’t even know what that means. Jesus, I need help, you think, and reach for that AI. So you never learn that “the flow” is very real. It means…just say…whatever comes into your head. That’s real. Natural. Decent. Honest. True. Maybe even a little funny. Because in that moment? When strangers meet, and everyone knows it’s to see if there’s going to be a spark? It doesn’t matter what you say. As long as it’s not something Donald Trump or Elon Musk would? Kid, you’re cool. The words aren’t the point here. The vibe is.
If you never learn that lesson? You stay a painfully awkward person your whole life long. A big burden to bear, never understanding that sometimes, often, the words don’t matter. Say anything. The intention, the eyes, the soul, the truth of you — that’s what matters a lot more. This is how humans really connect, or not. Imagine never learning that lesson…
Because AI can’t teach it. Then we have a society of people who don’t even know how to be social anymore. The tech-bros have turned us all into wierd caricatures of them, like they always wanted. What’s that about, anyways?
Now, you might think I’m going a little overboard, so let’s do another example, a related one. Teaching kids. AI can totally teach kids, right? That’s why they’re all using it, no?
AI learning often involves an individual working alone with a bot. The bot does the research to, as one AI tool says, “get you instant answers.” It can crowdsource information to help students find facts about their environment, solve a problem and come up with a creative way forward.
But AI doesn’t compel students to think through or retain anything. And simply being fed facts and information is not the same as “learning.”
Ultimately, if you want students to learn, they need to shore up their neural networks and use their neuroplasticity to develop their own intelligence. This is where AI falls short. There is nothing better than collaboration in real life — connected, reciprocal learning between a student and their peers or teachers — to spark the brain’s natural drive to develop and grow.
When my kids engage with AI, the interaction inevitably fizzles out. Eventually, they need to move their bodies, look one another in the eyes and communicate as they tackle a new skill.
That’s from a very, very interesting article by a professor of education. And if you think about it, she’s exactly right. And yet we’re in a funny, conflicted position as societies. On the one hand, we condemn it when kids use AIs to write essays and do homework, because we know it’s cheating, but on the other, we — a lot of us, anyways — want it to teach our kids. But…can it?
What does “cheating” really mean? Cheating doesn’t just mean: you got a good grade and you didn’t earn it. Cheating means, kid, you cheated yourself. You didn’t learn from that great book, essay, event, and so on. You didn’t even try to engage with the challenge of learning from it, which is part of the lesson too, because growing is sometimes hard. And you cheated everyone else, too, not of “grades,” but of the way in which we really learn, which is collectively, which is why school, from Aristotle’s time to now, has always been centered around classes.
But think of AI promises to upend all this. Now, even that form of relationship — teacher, class — is sundered. Now, we’re to have kids hunched over laptops, learning from their AIs. That trend began a while ago, in fairness, kids made to learn with weird, rote, programs. What is anyone going to “learn” this way? As Rina Bliss, the professor above points out, not a lot.
The question, though, is worth pursuing. There’s a kid whose primary relationship outside the family — with a teacher — has now been sundered. It’s not human-to-human anymore. Now, like more and more else in society, it’s an AI-mediated relationship. So what is that kid really learning? Well, most kids love their teachers — they don’t want to hurt, abuse, or demean them. Because the connection is human-to-human, and teachers aren’t that far removed from parents-outside-the-home, at least good ones. But an AI? It doesn’t have feelings, and if it says it does, it’s funny, because we all know it doesn’t. Kids are going to learn things from AI education, too, just not good ones. They’re going to learn indifference, how to dehumanize this primary figure in their life, the AI, how to game it, how to use it. You don’t do any of that to your teacher.
I’d say those consequences sound pretty profound. For kids, and as they grow up, for societies. Because democracies? They need educated people. Decent ones. Civilized ones. But if you’ve been brought up on a diet of AI, which is doing the heavy lifting for you? If AI now mediates most relationships, and you don’t have many, maybe any, real ones? Through which you genuinely experience the life of another? Through which your facilities for empathy, grace, truth, beauty, goodness, are being aroused, stimulated, expanded, enlivened, challenged? Good luck having a democracy, that way.
In this way, AI — whether we get it or not — is likely to shift our societies far, far to the right. Maybe deal them an irrecoverable blow. Because that is what happens to societies in which social bonds don’t exist, history doesn’t matter, everything is a game, and dehumanization, greed, and indifference are the only norms. This is where AI is taking us. It’s not good. It threatens to rip apart the three things, really, we should value most — modern economies, democracy, and civilization. Not in the way of unleashing some kind of sudden wave of killer robots on us, Matrix style — but in far, far more subtle, real, and tragic way.
By stealing away what makes us human, from the inside, without us even noticing it.
Remember Prometheus? Seeing humankind suffering, he stole the gift of fire, and gave it to us, so the myth goes. The gods, livid, punished him by having his liver pecked out by eagles for eternity. AI? It’s the opposite of Prometheus, and all it means, from fire, to the wheel, to the written word. It’s not the gift of fire. It’s a thief which steals the fire inside us. And puts it in a bottle, right there, in the place a heart should be, but never can. And those among us who are deluded, greedy, cruel, violent, and vain, point at this heart-breaking, wretched thing, a machine trying to show, desperately, that it has a soul, the very one it’s stolen from us, beating in its chest — they tell us that it’s really true. A tin man who stole our souls now has one of his own. It’s hard for me to think of a more Aeschylean tragedy than that.
The fundamental nature of the interaction has changed now.
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