"It makes products that are so much cheaper that they out-compete not on quality, but on price." I agree on that. It's the same as with industrial goods, as mentioned in the interview, like clothes, shoes etc.
What I want to add, because I think it is often overlooked, is that that price is more often than not just a hidden price, which is delayed or pushed out of sight: to future generations who will have to deal with the destruction of our environment with pollution (as is the case also with the cheap plastic that replaced all the quality stuff out of ceramics, tin and wood).
The same with AI: as far as I am informed it consumes huge amounts of energy and clean water - the energy production destroys the environment and exhausts our resources even further than already. And all this so a very few can accumulate even more and open the gap between the rich and the poor even more. That's the absurdity and the perversion of our time.
I worry about this too. The 'good enough' principle writ large. An erosion of our society's ability to sustain the arts and written work due to a surfeit of 'good enough' output.
Re: workshopping for a word to describe this: When describing what Generative AI is doing to productivity/jobs, we might call it "cheapification", the definition of which could be: the devaluation of human productivity by the replacement with an automated cheap — both in cost as in quality — alternative.
Introducing the category 'cheap' in a new area has been what the Industrial Revolution has been doing to product categories, and is what GenAI is now doing ('trying to do', actually: the productivity gain from AI 'workslop' may be illusionary for instance, see recent research) with everything that can be expressed in language and image (as both can be represented as bits).
Entrepreneurs (or as Adam Smith called them: 'undertakers') are about maximising profit from investment, and this is a natural driver for cheapification as long as 'more cheap' still means 'more profit' (mostly from increased volume). Note that driving for cheap by entrepreneurs also includes trying to pay less 'rent' (Smith again: labour, rent, and 'undertaking'). Hence, the fact that the GenAI entrepreneurs e.g. try to get out of paying any sort of (copyright) rent on the training materials they use is a sibling of what happens to paying for labour.
Great interview, thanks! I believe the Industrial Revolution analogy is part of the problem of 'AI', because while an engine is measured in horse power, it is not yet clear that machine learning can replace the expert class. The Turing test was designed for deception of the enemy, not accuracy. In the contemporary case, it is the investors in and cheerleaders for 'AI' who are the target of the deception.
... and some skills, that are lost because of AI may be lost forever from our culture. And that doesn't make us richer, as a society, but poorer and more dependent on a technology that we cannot replicate ourselves (as a smaller community). We are then dependent on the big tech lords and they then DO HAVE a monopoly and can set whatever prices they want and that makes the poor even poorer and the rich even richer. It's like a self-sustaining spiral (to hell).
What I want to say is that even just the loss of skill is enough argument for me to NOT WANT to use AI.
I'm not against every kind of technology. After all I appreciate central heating, warm water, transportation (from cars, to public transport to planes) and many things more. It IS a trap, when it leaves us culturally poorer than we were before and, as you said, offers very little in exchange for that.
I didn't mean to imply that you were anti-tech (although I wouldn't blame you for being so either) I guess the question I'm thinking about is technology always a trap? If your water heater goes out you can still light a fire outside and boil some water, it will take an order of magnitude more time and physical effort but it's still possible. In contrast if you wanted to make your own high quality cloth again it would take years of learning. Likewise for writing, animation, and coding that LLMS are attempting to deskill.
🙂 Don't worry, I wasn't thinking that you were implying that...
I think you summed it up quite well: some technologies are relatively easy to replace with simpler ones or allow us relatively easy to gain the knowledge to maintain and repair them (like in your example of the water heater and even the clothes; with a little bit of effort one can learn to make garments from scratch, from plant to cloth). AI on the other side, or even computers are far to complex, and because of that they have the capacity to become a source of dependence...
Have you been following the latest on humanoids - robots that do human work?
From brainwork to scutwork - there will be no jobs for humans is the goal of AI. And when that happens, given we remain a consumer society, who's gonna buy all the stuff AI's going to be churning out? And, please, don't give me that "abundance" crap ... name a time in the last 3 millennia that the surplus has ever (EVER) been shared rather than grabbed by a few powerful, ruthless and sociopathic individuals.
As to humanoids, try this one:
#### Seven-Eleven to overhaul staff with humanoids
The Rundown: Japan’s convenience store giant Seven-Eleven is going all-in on humanoids, partnering with Tokyo’s Telexistence to fast-track Astra, a robot designed to handle stocking, cleaning, and customer interaction in its network of 20K stores.
The details:
- The partnership with Telexistence moves beyond typical pilot projects as a full-scale bet on robots as a solution to Japan's labor crisis.
- Expected in stores by 2029, Astra is custom-built to handle the grunt work: stocking shelves, cleaning floors, and managing basic customer interactions.
- Telexistence’s pilot “Ghost” beverage restocking robots are already operating in Tokyo stores, serving as early testbeds for Astra's capabilities.
- With Toyota and top universities collaborating on the project, the partnership aims to make humanoids a practical and scalable reality.
Why it matters: Japan looks to be building the world's largest humanoid workforce to staff convenience stores — machines trained on massive retail datasets using vision-language-action models. If Astra works at scale, it’ll prove that humanoids can be economically viable workers, not just expensive demos doing backflips for YouTube.
The difference being that Japan is apparently hostile to low-skill economic migrants, and expensive for them to live in. We solved the shelf-stacking problem in Britain by allowing in pretty much anyone who wants to come, and then subsidising them after they arrive.
A Marxist or Luddite approach is not the solution to the challenges AI poses to working people.
Instead, we need to imbue the tech class with Abrahamic spiritual values.
I'm convinced that no practicing Catholic would ever declare a corporate goal of eliminating all jobs in five years, even as a fundraising stunt, as one bunch of tech bros in the valley recently did.
As great as that would be, we can't wait for Altman et al to have a come to Jesus moment, though as a Christian myself, I would very much like them to. We can't wait for them to see past their own greed and lust for power before we take steps to protect our livelihoods and dignity.
Whether or not they ever do, workers can engage in mutual aid and solidarity. The early church was a great example of this.
I think Marxist responses like unionism will simply accentuate what might be uncharitable characterized as the war on workers.
Prosletyzing tech bros (and Wall Street) with Abrahamic values has been a 3,000 year project, but I have (very recently) become convinced that jt is the only solution to this and virtually all of our problems.
It can be positioned as enlightened self-interest.
You demonstrate lamentable ignorance of Abrahamic values and are a good case study of the magnitude of the challenge. I will pray for your enlightenment.
Clearly now is not the time to instruct you. For me, it took 70 years until I was ready to hear the message. Your mileage may vary.
You may find as I did, that you are unwittingly in a spiritual desert, wandering, lost, drifting from one false deity to another. Science is a seductive one, yet what does it tell us about ourselves? We are at best accidents of chemical reactions, no better than animals or microbes, meaningless creatures, insignificant beyond human reasoning in a vast indifferent universe.
Is it any wonder we gleefully kill each other and ourselves?
You will say that more people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason. The issue there isn't God, it’s the hate in men’s hearts, like the hate I sense in you toward me. That’s what kills.
Jesus’ message was love, the antithesis of hate. It has been rejected as heresy by some, and perverted into holy War by others. That's the first order of business: showing those who think they understand the error of their ways. That's why the Abrahamic Accords are so important.
The next challenge is bringing non-believers and militant atheists like yourself into the fold.
This has been a three-millennium project. There is no guarantee of success. We are blessed, or cursed, with free will, because without evil there can be no good.
But what is the alternative? Continued butchery to the point of extinction.
Some self-loathing humans favor that, viewing humanity as some sort of destructive virus afflicting Gaia. I am grateful that I'm not sure longer among them.
You further manifest the depths of the sickness of your soul with every post. I will pray harder for your redemption before you manifest the hate in your heart kinetically.
The reduction in the working day has always been a progressive cause, driven by automation and a more sophisticated division of labor that it enables. Reduction to zero is the ultimate. The issue is not jobs or wages, but wealth distribution. Marx’s “TOTAL HUMAN BEING” comes to mind.
Interesting notion. When I was young, predictions of such a utopia were commonplace. Subsequently, one of the many great disappointments in the promises of tech smashed those Panglossian illusions.
Marxism promulgates similar nonsense.
The reality is that AI is never going to end work or markets. AI can't fix your toilet. I am also skeptical about robotics, self-driving cars, and the like.
If we ever do get to the point where we can automate everyone out of a job, we have major issues to address. Should we? What then?
Not sure skepticism is really a relevant construct here.The chances of a significant impact on the working day - averaged across all humanity - are not zero. We can all have views about how much of an impact and how fast. But less paid labor and more leisure time is a human win whatever the answer.
Being human implies extending choice over the use of our time without negatively impacting our life experience, and preferably improving it.
The other non-zero probability is that as the labor component of "things" reduces the cost will tend towards zero. It's not binary, but the fact that today we live like Kings lived in mediaeval times demonstrates that more automation = better life standards for less money. My working class Mom holidaying in Greece and Spain used to be impossible.
So if we have more time and everything is cheaper. What is not to like?
I concur with your comment. I’m actually optimistic about AI. It has increased my productivity exponentially. Of course, I didn't have a job at risk being a freelance writer. However many of my colleagues are deathly afraid of it. I'm not. I view it as a tool like any other. In my view you’d be a fool not to use this tool.
This has been long in the making, another IT driven narrative shift. The death of expertise, devaluation of education in favor of skills, bootcamps, "agile" speed of delivery where we want everything now ("progress over perfection" shitty slogan producing crappy solutions). Managers who don't know shit because they don't have specialized education. 10 years ago they wanted computer science majors, but SWEs have become too expensive, so it's time to redefine the market and change the narrative. Layoffs and AI are a useful tool. Data centers need builders and electricians, so the narrative is now driven toward trades. In this power imbalance, we've lost the core of our humanity that gets expressed through arts and humanities, that's where we come to understand what it means to be human.
This has been long in the making, another IT driven narrative shift. The death of expertise, devaluation of education in favor of skills, bootcamps, "agile" speed of delivery where we want everything now ("progress over perfection" shitty slogan producing crappy solutions). Managers who don't know shit because they don't have specialized education. 10 years ago they wanted computer science majors, but SWEs have become too expensive, so it's time to redefine the market and change the narrative. Layoffs are a useful tool. Data centers need builders and electricians, so the narrative is now driven toward trades. In this power imbalance, we've lost the core of our humanity that gets expressed through arts and humanities, that's where we come to understand what it means to be human.
On workshopping the term deskilling - I would suggest "sweat-shopifying" or "sweat shopping your job." You need to connect with an existing meme that people already resonate with intuitively. Giggify sort of does that. But with sweat shops, most people understood how these worked; they just didn't know it would happen to them. That dawning realization is what we need to facilitate.
"It makes products that are so much cheaper that they out-compete not on quality, but on price." I agree on that. It's the same as with industrial goods, as mentioned in the interview, like clothes, shoes etc.
What I want to add, because I think it is often overlooked, is that that price is more often than not just a hidden price, which is delayed or pushed out of sight: to future generations who will have to deal with the destruction of our environment with pollution (as is the case also with the cheap plastic that replaced all the quality stuff out of ceramics, tin and wood).
The same with AI: as far as I am informed it consumes huge amounts of energy and clean water - the energy production destroys the environment and exhausts our resources even further than already. And all this so a very few can accumulate even more and open the gap between the rich and the poor even more. That's the absurdity and the perversion of our time.
Yes, a very good point, thanks for making it.
The real danger is not only wage suppression, but the normalization of mediocrity.
Once people adapt to average results, they lose the ability to demand depth.
At that point, experts’ voices no longer reach them.
I worry about this too. The 'good enough' principle writ large. An erosion of our society's ability to sustain the arts and written work due to a surfeit of 'good enough' output.
Exactly. Social media has already trained us to accept "good enough" as the norm.
What worries me is that AI might finish what they started, leaving depth as an endangered species.
Oh, I thought you meant Netflix.
Re: workshopping for a word to describe this: When describing what Generative AI is doing to productivity/jobs, we might call it "cheapification", the definition of which could be: the devaluation of human productivity by the replacement with an automated cheap — both in cost as in quality — alternative.
Introducing the category 'cheap' in a new area has been what the Industrial Revolution has been doing to product categories, and is what GenAI is now doing ('trying to do', actually: the productivity gain from AI 'workslop' may be illusionary for instance, see recent research) with everything that can be expressed in language and image (as both can be represented as bits).
Entrepreneurs (or as Adam Smith called them: 'undertakers') are about maximising profit from investment, and this is a natural driver for cheapification as long as 'more cheap' still means 'more profit' (mostly from increased volume). Note that driving for cheap by entrepreneurs also includes trying to pay less 'rent' (Smith again: labour, rent, and 'undertaking'). Hence, the fact that the GenAI entrepreneurs e.g. try to get out of paying any sort of (copyright) rent on the training materials they use is a sibling of what happens to paying for labour.
I keep hearing about all the great gifts that AI will bring to humanity, but all I see is identity theft and sweatshops so far...
Great interview, thanks! I believe the Industrial Revolution analogy is part of the problem of 'AI', because while an engine is measured in horse power, it is not yet clear that machine learning can replace the expert class. The Turing test was designed for deception of the enemy, not accuracy. In the contemporary case, it is the investors in and cheerleaders for 'AI' who are the target of the deception.
How about this for a catchy word to describe AI's effect on jobs and wages and quality?
Enshittijobation
Insightful 👏
... and some skills, that are lost because of AI may be lost forever from our culture. And that doesn't make us richer, as a society, but poorer and more dependent on a technology that we cannot replicate ourselves (as a smaller community). We are then dependent on the big tech lords and they then DO HAVE a monopoly and can set whatever prices they want and that makes the poor even poorer and the rich even richer. It's like a self-sustaining spiral (to hell).
What I want to say is that even just the loss of skill is enough argument for me to NOT WANT to use AI.
Hence why technology is a trap. This particular one just seems to have less on offer than say cheap clothing.
I'm not against every kind of technology. After all I appreciate central heating, warm water, transportation (from cars, to public transport to planes) and many things more. It IS a trap, when it leaves us culturally poorer than we were before and, as you said, offers very little in exchange for that.
I didn't mean to imply that you were anti-tech (although I wouldn't blame you for being so either) I guess the question I'm thinking about is technology always a trap? If your water heater goes out you can still light a fire outside and boil some water, it will take an order of magnitude more time and physical effort but it's still possible. In contrast if you wanted to make your own high quality cloth again it would take years of learning. Likewise for writing, animation, and coding that LLMS are attempting to deskill.
🙂 Don't worry, I wasn't thinking that you were implying that...
I think you summed it up quite well: some technologies are relatively easy to replace with simpler ones or allow us relatively easy to gain the knowledge to maintain and repair them (like in your example of the water heater and even the clothes; with a little bit of effort one can learn to make garments from scratch, from plant to cloth). AI on the other side, or even computers are far to complex, and because of that they have the capacity to become a source of dependence...
Brian, this is razor-sharp.
You and Hagen cut past the hype — AI as wage tech is the real story.
That idea of “industrialized language” reframes everything.
Makes me wonder: if algorithms deskill, can design itself become a form of resistance?
Have you been following the latest on humanoids - robots that do human work?
From brainwork to scutwork - there will be no jobs for humans is the goal of AI. And when that happens, given we remain a consumer society, who's gonna buy all the stuff AI's going to be churning out? And, please, don't give me that "abundance" crap ... name a time in the last 3 millennia that the surplus has ever (EVER) been shared rather than grabbed by a few powerful, ruthless and sociopathic individuals.
As to humanoids, try this one:
#### Seven-Eleven to overhaul staff with humanoids
The Rundown: Japan’s convenience store giant Seven-Eleven is going all-in on humanoids, partnering with Tokyo’s Telexistence to fast-track Astra, a robot designed to handle stocking, cleaning, and customer interaction in its network of 20K stores.
The details:
- The partnership with Telexistence moves beyond typical pilot projects as a full-scale bet on robots as a solution to Japan's labor crisis.
- Expected in stores by 2029, Astra is custom-built to handle the grunt work: stocking shelves, cleaning floors, and managing basic customer interactions.
- Telexistence’s pilot “Ghost” beverage restocking robots are already operating in Tokyo stores, serving as early testbeds for Astra's capabilities.
- With Toyota and top universities collaborating on the project, the partnership aims to make humanoids a practical and scalable reality.
Why it matters: Japan looks to be building the world's largest humanoid workforce to staff convenience stores — machines trained on massive retail datasets using vision-language-action models. If Astra works at scale, it’ll prove that humanoids can be economically viable workers, not just expensive demos doing backflips for YouTube.
The difference being that Japan is apparently hostile to low-skill economic migrants, and expensive for them to live in. We solved the shelf-stacking problem in Britain by allowing in pretty much anyone who wants to come, and then subsidising them after they arrive.
A Marxist or Luddite approach is not the solution to the challenges AI poses to working people.
Instead, we need to imbue the tech class with Abrahamic spiritual values.
I'm convinced that no practicing Catholic would ever declare a corporate goal of eliminating all jobs in five years, even as a fundraising stunt, as one bunch of tech bros in the valley recently did.
As great as that would be, we can't wait for Altman et al to have a come to Jesus moment, though as a Christian myself, I would very much like them to. We can't wait for them to see past their own greed and lust for power before we take steps to protect our livelihoods and dignity.
Whether or not they ever do, workers can engage in mutual aid and solidarity. The early church was a great example of this.
I think Marxist responses like unionism will simply accentuate what might be uncharitable characterized as the war on workers.
Prosletyzing tech bros (and Wall Street) with Abrahamic values has been a 3,000 year project, but I have (very recently) become convinced that jt is the only solution to this and virtually all of our problems.
It can be positioned as enlightened self-interest.
All I'll add is that unions predate Karl Marx. In England, they date back to the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
You refer to guilds presumably.
They were extensions of the guilds that predated them and so protected similar specialized workers:
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2212/trade-unions-in-the-british-industrial-revolution/
Abrahamic values like genocide and subjugation of the people? Laughable. Keep your bronze age bullshit in the history books where it belongs.
You demonstrate lamentable ignorance of Abrahamic values and are a good case study of the magnitude of the challenge. I will pray for your enlightenment.
Clearly now is not the time to instruct you. For me, it took 70 years until I was ready to hear the message. Your mileage may vary.
You may find as I did, that you are unwittingly in a spiritual desert, wandering, lost, drifting from one false deity to another. Science is a seductive one, yet what does it tell us about ourselves? We are at best accidents of chemical reactions, no better than animals or microbes, meaningless creatures, insignificant beyond human reasoning in a vast indifferent universe.
Is it any wonder we gleefully kill each other and ourselves?
You will say that more people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason. The issue there isn't God, it’s the hate in men’s hearts, like the hate I sense in you toward me. That’s what kills.
Jesus’ message was love, the antithesis of hate. It has been rejected as heresy by some, and perverted into holy War by others. That's the first order of business: showing those who think they understand the error of their ways. That's why the Abrahamic Accords are so important.
The next challenge is bringing non-believers and militant atheists like yourself into the fold.
This has been a three-millennium project. There is no guarantee of success. We are blessed, or cursed, with free will, because without evil there can be no good.
But what is the alternative? Continued butchery to the point of extinction.
Some self-loathing humans favor that, viewing humanity as some sort of destructive virus afflicting Gaia. I am grateful that I'm not sure longer among them.
I will pray for you and I wish you well.
Smoke some crack, you might start making sense. You're just rambling about nothing, might as well put some imagination into it.
You further manifest the depths of the sickness of your soul with every post. I will pray harder for your redemption before you manifest the hate in your heart kinetically.
The reduction in the working day has always been a progressive cause, driven by automation and a more sophisticated division of labor that it enables. Reduction to zero is the ultimate. The issue is not jobs or wages, but wealth distribution. Marx’s “TOTAL HUMAN BEING” comes to mind.
Interesting notion. When I was young, predictions of such a utopia were commonplace. Subsequently, one of the many great disappointments in the promises of tech smashed those Panglossian illusions.
Marxism promulgates similar nonsense.
The reality is that AI is never going to end work or markets. AI can't fix your toilet. I am also skeptical about robotics, self-driving cars, and the like.
If we ever do get to the point where we can automate everyone out of a job, we have major issues to address. Should we? What then?
Not sure skepticism is really a relevant construct here.The chances of a significant impact on the working day - averaged across all humanity - are not zero. We can all have views about how much of an impact and how fast. But less paid labor and more leisure time is a human win whatever the answer.
Being human implies extending choice over the use of our time without negatively impacting our life experience, and preferably improving it.
The other non-zero probability is that as the labor component of "things" reduces the cost will tend towards zero. It's not binary, but the fact that today we live like Kings lived in mediaeval times demonstrates that more automation = better life standards for less money. My working class Mom holidaying in Greece and Spain used to be impossible.
So if we have more time and everything is cheaper. What is not to like?
I concur with your comment. I’m actually optimistic about AI. It has increased my productivity exponentially. Of course, I didn't have a job at risk being a freelance writer. However many of my colleagues are deathly afraid of it. I'm not. I view it as a tool like any other. In my view you’d be a fool not to use this tool.
The Pope is a practicing Catholic and he protects pedophiles.
This has been long in the making, another IT driven narrative shift. The death of expertise, devaluation of education in favor of skills, bootcamps, "agile" speed of delivery where we want everything now ("progress over perfection" shitty slogan producing crappy solutions). Managers who don't know shit because they don't have specialized education. 10 years ago they wanted computer science majors, but SWEs have become too expensive, so it's time to redefine the market and change the narrative. Layoffs and AI are a useful tool. Data centers need builders and electricians, so the narrative is now driven toward trades. In this power imbalance, we've lost the core of our humanity that gets expressed through arts and humanities, that's where we come to understand what it means to be human.
This has been long in the making, another IT driven narrative shift. The death of expertise, devaluation of education in favor of skills, bootcamps, "agile" speed of delivery where we want everything now ("progress over perfection" shitty slogan producing crappy solutions). Managers who don't know shit because they don't have specialized education. 10 years ago they wanted computer science majors, but SWEs have become too expensive, so it's time to redefine the market and change the narrative. Layoffs are a useful tool. Data centers need builders and electricians, so the narrative is now driven toward trades. In this power imbalance, we've lost the core of our humanity that gets expressed through arts and humanities, that's where we come to understand what it means to be human.
On workshopping the term deskilling - I would suggest "sweat-shopifying" or "sweat shopping your job." You need to connect with an existing meme that people already resonate with intuitively. Giggify sort of does that. But with sweat shops, most people understood how these worked; they just didn't know it would happen to them. That dawning realization is what we need to facilitate.