mapping the crazy AI world

1. Whatever it ends up doing, I interpret AI as intended to be a class weapon against credentialed, skilled, and cognitive workers.


2. Tech advances are, in fact, changing the “relations of production.” It’s proletarianizing new types of work.


3. This mayheighten class struggle again, as it creates more proletarianized workers who self-consciously organize

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What if the questions were instead: What kinds of labor markets are being designed around AI? What is shaping the choices about adoption? Who has bargaining power in those decisions? How will the value created by as yet unfounded promises of productivity growth be distributed? Who has power and how is it wielded to promote certain interests and... See more

As artificial intelligence reconfigures every dimension of our societies—from labor markets to classrooms to newsrooms—we should remember the Luddites. Not as caricatures, but in the original sense: People who refuse to accept that the deployment of new technology should be dictated unilaterally by corporations or in cahoots with the government,... See more

“Most major technological innovations come into the world like electric arc lighting—wondrous, challenging, sometimes dangerous, always raw and imperfect,” Goldfarb and Kirsch write in Bubbles . “Inventors, entrepreneurs, investors, regulators, and customers struggle to figure out what the technology can do, how to organize its production and... See more

intentional friction keeps my thinking sharp and ensures that when I do engage with automation, I do so from a place of genuine understanding and deliberate choice.

the pedagogical value of a writing assignment doesn’t lie in the tangible product of the work — the paper that gets handed in at the assignment’s end. It lies in the work itself: the critical reading of source materials, the synthesis of evidence and ideas, the formulation of a thesis and an argument, and the expression of thought in a coherent... See more

as they communicate in ways that are literal, or strange, or narrow-minded, or just plain wrong, we will incorporate their responses into our lives unthinkingly.

1. Audit your skill stack. List the 3–5 core components of your role. Circle the one you’d be least confident doing solo. That’s your first gap.

2. Map the adjacent skills. Write down the two roles you rely on most but don’t do yourself (designer? analyst? ops?).

3. Zoom out to cross-functional human skills. Pick one “people” capability you... See more