Q9F

The moral panic around AI is always framed from the point of view of those who still have something to lose, never from the position of those whose work has already been historically devalued, over-exploited or rendered invisible.

The real question is not whether AI steals jobs. The real question is who owns the machines , who benefits from the freed time, who captures the value that is produced.

There is a segment of the population that imagines itself on the winning side of cognitive capitalism. Supposedly creative, symbolic , intellectual jobs, protected by prestige and by the comforting idea that they are too subtle to be automated. That group benefited for a long time from a system where others carried out the most thankless, physical and repetitive tasks without ever receiving the same social status.

And now, lol, that AI starts touching their comfort zone everything suddenly turns into red alert.

The most harshly exploited jobs have already been squeezed, automated and flexibilised for decades.

Now AI is shaking symbolic comfort, and it creates a sociological vertigo...that is fascinating to observe. The panic comes from the fact that the beneficiaries of liberalism, meritocracy are suddenly discovering what others groups have lived with for a long time. They discover precarity, devaluation (!!!), the threat of being interchangeable. They discover that capital is attached to no one.

The irony is that this destabilisation could become a political opportunity. Because if even the protected strata start to feel structural insecurity, we might hope for the beginning of a shared awareness. But for now what we mostly see is a narcissistic retreat...