The Three Things AI Is Going To Take Away From Us (And Why They Matter Most)

How AI Threatens Our Economies, Societies, and Democracies

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In six months, a year, or two, from now, the first wave of AI-made layoffs is going to hit the economy. A whole lot of execs, having figured out that a whole lot of people are beginning to use AI to do their jobs, are going to dispense with the middleman. They’re not going to care very much if the resulting work — writing copy, reviewing documents, forming relationships — is done with little care, and less quality. They’re just going to see the dollar signs.

And then what? Because we’re already in an economy where people are stretched so thin that they’re using buy now, pay later to pay for groceries. That’s a last resort. They’re maxed out in every other way. They’ve tapped out their “credit,” their incomes have cratered in real terms relative to eye-watering inflation, they have no real resources left. What happens you take an economy stretched that thin…and pull? It breaks. Those layoffs will lead to delinquencies and bad debt which will cause bank failures, which will require the classic sequence of bailouts, shrunken public services, and lower investment. And then we’ll be in the first economic AI crash — right when it’s supposed to be booming.

Those jobs? They’re never coming back. A hole will have been ripped in the economy. You can already see glimmers of what those jobs are — not really jobs, entire fields and industries will be decimated, and already are. Those who are proficient in manipulating AI think they’re clever for holding down four, five, six jobs at once — but the flip side of the coin is that they’re taking them from other people. You can see the writing on the wall. Many forms of pink-collar work? Toast. Clerical work, organizational work, secretarial slash assistant style work. And then you can go up the ladder. Graphic designers and musicians? Good luck, you’re going to need it. Writers (shudder) and publishers and editors? LOL. All the way up to programmers, who used to be, not so long ago, the economy’s newest and most in-demand profession. We can keep going, almost endlessly. Therapists? Check. Doctors — GPs? Eventually.

Even…all those executives themselves…who are going to fire today’s pink-collar masses? Probably. And from there, you begin to see the scale and scope of the problem.

It’s not that AI’s going to “kill us all.” We’re doing a pretty good job of that, in case you haven’t noticed. But it is that AI is going to rip away from us the the three things that we value most. Our economies, human interaction, and in the end, democracy.

I’ve taken you through the first, just a little bit. Let’s consider the second, human interaction. What are people doing with AI? One major use of it is to, LOL, replace actual human relationships. There’s a funny and great article by Taylor Lorenz, just today, on how AI datings apps are becoming popular, even if their results are creepy and weird so far. Once upon a time, internet dating itself was a little weird. Now, it’s ubiquitous. Maybe you see the point here. Then there’s the even creepier Replika, which wants to make you a full AI…girlfriend…boyfriend…just a friend…though of course if you want to get romantic, meaning sexual, well, that’s a premium service, sir, ma’am.

These are extreme examples which won’t seem so extreme in the not-so-distant future. You can see the push to replace real human relationships gathering real force and momentum now. Let’s take the example of all those clever guys using AI to impersonate a person having a job. The AI’s the one talking to their colleagues, co-workers, juniors, boss, really, which is the point of using it to draft not just the “work” itself, but correspondence, communications, emails, even chats. That’s a simple example of the way AI will impact human relationships.

More and more of our relationships will become AI-mediated ones. That means that instead of a direct you-to-me connection, there’ll be an AI in the middle. Meaning, a computer program which tells us what to say, do, think, want, know, request, desire. Let’s go back to the AI dating example, because there, it’s incredibly clear to see — before there was a human-to-human connection. Now, there’s an AI in the middle. And it’s dictating terms, precisely because that’s the kind of interaction that’s awkward, uncomfortable, challenging, demanding. So it’ll tell you what to say, what to think, how to behave, when to say it.

To say that we stand to lose human relationships themselves is an incredibly creepy thing to have to write. It’s never really happened before in history. But whose fault is it? You see, the problem in the examples above isn’t just AI — it’s us. I could tell all these young people what the older me knows. Hey, guys, these things are like this for a reason. Good books are hard to read for a reason. Dates are fraught for a reason. Meaningful work is hard for a reason. And real relationships? LOL, they’re even harder than all those. For a reason. That reason is to expand us, enlighten us, lift us up, and that’s not easy, precisely because we ourselves often resist it.