mapping the crazy AI world

The AI industry is telling a story about the future of work that goes roughly like this: automate what can be automated, augment what remains, and trust that the productivity gains will compound into a wealthier, more efficient world.

The Social Edge Framework tells a different story. It says: the intelligence we are automating was never ours alone.... See more

If AI capability depends on the social complexity of human language production—and if AI deployment systematically reduces that complexity through cognitive offloading, homogenization of creative output, and the elimination of interaction-dense work—then the technology is gradually undermining the conditions for its own advancement. Its successes,... See more

We are judging them as failed public documents, when in fact they are private and mostly disposable records of our stream of consciousness.

Yet this is not merely a matter of bad messaging on the tech industry’s part, either. That second key plank of the AI narrative, again, broadcast directly by the CEOs themselves—that it will take everyone’s jobs—is not simply dismissible. It’s the selling point. Investors don’t ultimately much care whether OpenAI renders software sentient; they... See more

Here’s the mechanism more precisely. When AI automates commodity production, prices in that sector fall. That raises real income. If the goods and services people want more of as they get richer lie disproportionately in the relational sector, demand shifts in that direction. Baumol’s cost disease then amplifies the result: if the relational sector... See more

But the economic logic goes beyond art. It extends to any category where the human element is integral to the value: teachers, nurses, therapists, childcare workers, trainers, hospitality, clergy, guides, and many forms of local services. In all of these cases the human being is not just an input into the production process. Their judgment,... See more

The social aspects of products such as the relationships, the status, and exclusivity—what Rene Girard called the mimetic properties of desire—become much more relevant once people’s basic needs are satisfied. And the demand for these properties will bring the human element back into the production process, and with it, the jobs.

The market for feeling productive is orders of magnitude larger than the market for being productive.