Previously, data privacy concerns were abstract for most, leading only to worse ads. Now, giving AI companies unfettered access to your professional data provides them with the exact material needed to train models that will automate your job.
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Beyond displacing current workers, AI will lead to hiring "abatement," where companies proactively eliminate roles from their hiring plans altogether. This is a subtle but profound workforce shift, as entire job categories may vanish from the market before employees can be retrained.
AI's core strength is hyper-sophisticated pattern recognition. If your daily tasks—from filing insurance claims to diagnosing patients—can be broken down into a data set of repeatable patterns, AI can learn to perform them faster and more accurately than a human.
The primary bottleneck for advancing AI is high-quality, tacit data—skills and local insights that are hard to digitize. Individuals can retain economic value by guarding this information and using it to train personalized AI tools that work for them, not their employers.
Just as NAFTA brought cheap goods but eliminated manufacturing jobs, AI will create immense productivity via a new class of "digital immigrants" (AIs in data centers). This will generate abundance and cheap digital services but risks displacing vast swaths of cognitive labor and concentrating wealth.
As a side hustle, lawyers are now working for data-labeling companies to train AI models on legal tasks. While they see it as being 'part of the change,' they are directly contributing to building the technology that could automate and devalue the very expertise they possess, potentially cannibalizing their future work.
For current AI valuations to be realized, AI must deliver unprecedented efficiency, likely causing mass job displacement. This would disrupt the consumer economy that supports these companies, creating a fundamental contradiction where the condition for success undermines the system itself.
Unlike past technological shifts where humans could learn new trades, AI is a "tractor for everything." It will automate a task and then move to automate the next available task faster than a human can reskill, making long-term job security increasingly precarious for cognitive labor.
Frame AI not as a tool, but as a wave of "digital immigrants" with superhuman cognitive abilities. Similar to how the NAFTA trade agreement outsourced manufacturing, AI will outsource knowledge work. This will create abundance for some but risks hollowing out the middle class and social fabric.
Capitalism values scarcity. AI's core disruption is not just automating tasks, but making human-like intellectual labor so abundant that its market value approaches zero. This breaks the fundamental economic loop of trading scarce labor for wages.
As AIs increasingly perform all economically necessary work, the incentive for entities like governments and corporations to invest in human capital may disappear. This creates a long-term risk of a society where humans are no longer seen as a necessary resource to cultivate, leading to a permanent dependency.
