Stop AI Doomscrolling And Start Organizing｜Fast Company

AI is this asteroid that is coming to Earth. And there's all these benefits that occur right now. They're almost like the sideshow, while the bigger asteroid of artificial general intelligence is hurtling towards Earth, which can totally transform the way that our economy works and is basically in the interests of 10 soon-to-be trillionaires, while likely disempowering the rest of us. This is gonna be a fun conversation, guys. Strap, strap, strap in. AI is a frustratingly vague term for a hyperobject that is touching every part of our lives and every part of our futures. It's a philosophical invitation, but it's a philosophical invitation with a deadline. Because if we don't get the answers right, there will be consequences. I think a lot of companies know that they can now replace a lot of their workers, financial analysts, marketing, data input. And the thing that's different about AI from other technologies is that AI accelerates AI, right? If I make an advance in nukes, nukes don't invent better nuclear weapons. But AI is intelligence. So I can point that intelligence at the code that makes AI and say, make that code run faster. And I think that just presents a kind of a double exponential curve that our brain has a hard time metabolizing. But as job loss starts to hit, I think that will be a major and significant way that people experience it. For the nerds, that's called recursive self-improvement. And it's just the kind of the fear is that it becomes a runaway train. Even if you don't lose your jobs, it will be devaluing your job. Because if your job becomes easier, then they can pay anyone to do it. Taxi drivers had to train so long to become taxi drivers, and they're protected by a labor union. Uber comes in and they disrupted that industry in a way that now they can pay the drivers less because it's all automated. You don't actually have to have any skills. Meanwhile, they are charging customers more. And that's kind of sort of the instantification of technology that we have already experienced through social media and all these other platforms. I believe that's probably what's coming next, honestly. Agentic AI and all these things. Sure, that stuff might be happening, but I think the instantification is coming because they need to start making money. How does OpenAI return the trillions of dollars that have been invested into it? They have more debt stacked on them right now than Uber, Netflix, YouTube, like all those companies that took lots of debt before they turned a profit. The AI company, specifically OpenAI, has taken on way more debt. The only thing that will return that is not your chat GPT subscription. It's not advertising. The only thing that returns that is building a replacement for all human labor in the economy. Their mission is not to augment every worker and give you tools. Their mission is to replace every form of human economic labor in the economy. That incentive is what should give you clarity about which direction this goes. What that means is every company that has an employee that they have to pay a lot of money and they might whistleblow and they sleep and they complain and they need childcare. Or I could pay an AI. And so there's something in AI called the intelligence curse. This is based on in economics, the resource curse. If you have a country that discovers that its GDP can come from, say, oil, like think Venezuela, and then suddenly all of its GDP is coming from that resource and not from the labor of its people. So there you are as a government. Am I going to put money into better oil infrastructure or more human infrastructure? What happens when the U.S. gets more of its GDP from five AI companies and doesn't get any of its GDP from the people? Am I going to invest in healthcare and childcare and education? Or am I going to invest in data centers and solar panels and Nvidia chips? You can see that this is leading to a worldview where we don't actually value humans. And unlike the industrial revolution, where a labor union could band together and say, we don't like these working conditions, we're going to withdraw and bargain. In this new economy, what power do you have? Because countries don't need you for your tax revenue and corporations don't need you for your labor because it's coming from AI. So this is literally the last moment that your political voice will matter. And this is not trying to be Doomer. This is trying to be clear-eyed. Let's change course. Let's have a system, not the intelligence curse. Let's create the intelligence dividend like Norway did with its sovereign wealth fund, where you distribute the gains to everybody, like Alaska does with its sovereign wealth fund. You distribute the oil revenues to everyone in the state. We can do things like that if we're really clear-eyed and let's not wait for the catastrophe. Let's do it right now. We should be demanding a plan of some sort. If we're going to be dealing with these companies and giving them our money and giving them our business, we should be able to say, hey, actually, I'm going to wait. I'm going to hold off. I'm going to pull back my engagement with this technology until an actual plan is set in place for how we are going to deal with job loss, job transition. Basically, after the industrial revolution, we had to build a completely new relationship with work. We're going to have to do that again. But we don't have to wait until everything gets bad before we do that. We have the foresight now. I just encourage anyone who's worried about their jobs to push back and have conversations and really organize and try to figure out how we can use our leverage right now while we still have it. Most of my life, I was worried that I was useless. I was not good at most things. I was not good at school. I was not good at sports. I felt like I do not have anything to contribute to the GDP of my country or even to my family. I had such an anxiety about this because of the story the system told me as a kid. The story told me I'm only useful if I can help them with something productive or whatever. But there's so many things within me and within everyone in this room and everyone watching this video that the system would call useless. And the system would say is disorganized and uncontrollable and inefficient and hard to define. To be definable is to be controllable. And to be controllable is allowing them to go down this path. So I encourage people to search deeply for the flawed, broken, useless things and really express those things and really use those things to break free from the trajectory. If we can have the imagination to imagine a world in which the things that I thought was useless in me could actually be the things most useful and the thing that the system could actually incentivize for and love and care for and nurture, that's the world I want to be living in. And that's going to require that kind of imagination and that kind of bravery. So I think that is our way forward. As dark as it seems, as impossible as it seems, I think the fact that we're having these conversations now and a lot of people are angry and frustrated and riled up about it, you are not alone. And so this is our opportunity to come together.