Empty Pointers and Constellations of AI

The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company.

That’s it.

That’s the $13T growth story that MorganStanley is telling. It’s why big investors and institutionals are giving AI companies hundreds of billions of dollars. And because they are piling in, normies are also getting sucked in, risking their retirement savings and their family’s financial security.

Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem. We’d have to figure out what to do with all these technologically unemployed people.

But AI can’t do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to save anyone money.

Whenever anyone states that “AI is the future, so…” or “many people are using AI anyway, so…” they are not only expressing an opinion — they‘re shaping that future.

I’ve come to realize that statements about the future aren’t predictions: they’re more like spells. When someone describes something to you as the future, they’re sharing a heartfelt belief that this something will be part of whatever comes next. “Artificial intelligence isn’t going anywhere” quite literally involves casting a technology forward into time. How could that be anything else but a kind of magic?

It’s creepy to tell people they’ll lose their jobs if they don’t use AI. It’s weird to assume AI critics hate progress and are resisting some inevitable future.

Under the guise of technological inevitability, companies are using the AI boom to rewrite the social contract — laying off employees, rehiring them at lower wages, intensifying workloads, and normalizing precarity. In short, these are political choices masquerading as technical necessities, AI is not the cause of the layoffs but their justification.