AI Is Not the Villain (or the Hero)

Hey all, I want to take a moment to clarify what I think is happening with jobs, AI, and tech in general right now.

The common narrative is that AI is the villain, and it's taking away our amazing corporate jobs. And that this is a huge mistake, because 1) we love our corporate jobs, and 2) AI isn't even good enough to replace a bad worker, let alone a good one.

Please allow me to to offer another perspective. A completely different frame, in the spirit of Deutschian "hard-to-vary" Explanation.

This push to remove human jobs pre-dates AI by...basically forever.

If founders/companies could do all the work themselves they would NEVER have hired a single employee. They don't hire them for fun, because they like people. Companies hire people because they absolutely MUST. Because there is no alternative. They hire when they can't do the work themselves, and there's no machine or automation that can do the work as good or better. It's a last resort, and not desirable.

The exact moment that changes, is the moment the jobs go away. This is not an AI thing. It has nothing to do with AI. This is a most-every-single-business-everywhere thing.

By framing things with AI at the center, we ignore this fundamental and gross reality about jobs, work, and business, and we're raising up a Strawman to attack. Anthropic, or OpenAI, or greedy business people, or whatever.

I think this is harmful rather than helpful.

I recommend we switch the "enemy" to the old way of thinking about work, where all work must be done through corporations. Because that relies 100% on companies not being able to do the work themselves, which is going away.

Instead lets build PEOPLE up! Let's help PEOPLE believe in their own capabilities. Let's help them create their own presences online to advertise their skills independently. As themselves.

Sure, they can then use that presence to get a corporate job if they want, but then it will be in a more equal type of exchange as opposed to them being "the worker" and the company having all the power.

And then, over time, it'll just be mostly people and their services, interacting with other people and their services. Like a human-to-human layer of connection (with some tech wiring it all up).

We have these corporate jobs, and they pay bills. I get that. So it's scary as hell to be losing them. But this is not some artificial disruption of business as usual: it's literally the same thing businesses and corporations have always done, which is trying to bring the labor in-house through automation.

The answer is not being mad at AI, or mad at corporations, for doing the exact thing they're there to do. The solution is to remake ourselves so that we don't need them for our livelihood. It's not healthy. It never has been.

We always needed to move away from it, and now we're being forced to, so let's try our best to figure out the new game and embrace it.

The transition will suck, but the other side will be far more human.

🫶🏼