Pinchbeck argues that AI-driven mass unemployment reads as catastrophe only because of who owns the machines, and that the same displacement under different ownership would be emancipation. He sets the doom case, including IMF estimates that 40% of global employment and 60% in advanced economies are exposed, Emad Mostaque's The Last Economy and its thesis of intelligence inversion, and research on cognitive offloading, against Oscar Wilde's 1891 essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, which held that the future of the world depends on the slavery of the machine and envisioned cultivated leisure. He invokes David Graeber on meaningless jobs and Antonio Negri's claim that capital is a social relation.
In brief
- Pinchbeck identifies AI and robotics as the arrival of the mechanical slavery Oscar Wilde predicted in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, which Wilde argued would free people to develop their individuality rather than their property.
- The essay argues that automation produces misery only because survival is tied to market utility under private ownership of productive capacity, so that a machine replacing five hundred workers enriches one owner and destitutes the rest.
- Pinchbeck rejects the claim that work itself generates meaning, calling it a convenience of capitalist society, and notes that people with inherited financial freedom do not seek out factory or clerical labor.
- The essay accepts evidence of AI-induced cognitive decline, including a study of developers who produced working code with an AI assistant but failed conceptual understanding tests, while arguing the same tools could be the most powerful learning instrument yet built.
- Pinchbeck endorses Wilde's version of socialism as voluntary association supplying necessary commodities, distinguished from an authoritarian state that Wilde said would make the last state of man worse than the first.
Full text
And what about you? Do you think humans are conscious? Don't be silly, my dear. Right now, many believe that the societal impact of artificial intelligence is going to be absolutely devastating. Journalists, experts in the AI field, tech CEOs keep sounding the alarm. They're warning us that AI, even if it doesn't make us extinct, which many think is possible, will lead to a massive job apocalypse, an economic cataclysm beyond anything we can imagine or have experienced in the past. And this job apocalypse could happen in a decade, or might even just take 3 years, or even less. And in fact, we're already seeing a lot of layoffs, mass layoffs in the tech industries and so on, but across many fields.
So, in what follows, I'm going to look into the dangers and threats of AI, but I also really want to outline a revolutionary and utopian outlying possibility. And this is something that a famous dandy and wit from Victorian England presciently foresaw over 130 years ago. So, yeah, experts, many experts tell us that AI will soon make a lot of human labor obsolete, and this is going to start, ironically, already has kind of started with white-collar jobs, such as software programmers to accountants to to legal assistants to customer service reps, call service people, also designers, consultants, you know, jingle writers, investment bankers, and so on. But then, as AI-powered robotics develops further, we're going to see blue-collar jobs, such as factory workers or truck drivers or trash collectors, and, you know, most everything else, like minus a few fields, are also going to be eliminated. And we're all going to be replaced by a workforce that needs no vacations, that works 24/7 without ever asking for a raise, that will never unionize, as far as we know, or seek better working conditions.
At this point, the only safe jobs might be ones that require direct human touch, like massage or maybe sex work. But of course, we might also ask, how is capitalist production, how is this whole system going to keep functioning in such a scenario? Who does Amazon or Apple or anybody think they're going to sell their products to, for instance, or Tesla, if everybody is unemployed and destitute? I guess it seems that our ruling elites have decided we're all going to fall off that bridge when we come to it. So, given all of this, you might find yourself asking yourself a question. What part of me cannot be made obsolete by artificial intelligence?
What part of me is precious and unique? Is it my creativity, my ancestry, my remembered past, the quality of my relationships, my feelings? By the way, feel free to formulate an answer to this in the question in the comments below. And also, while you're at it, please remember to subscribe and like the video. So, yeah, I mean, AI is already unleashing extremely negative impacts on our collective life with greater dangers ahead. Yet, it's also possible that this technology, used intentionally and with care, could liberate almost everybody from meaningless work and drudgery. That it could be used to not only massively improve people's lives, but give them, give all of us a new sense of dignity and purpose.
And I know that sounds far-fetched from where we are now, but let's uh let's consider it at least. To do so, I think we need to go all the way back to 1891, as that was the year that Oscar Wilde, the famous playwright, dandy, famous English wit, wrote a brilliant essay, a political manifesto, where he envisioned a future in which humanity would be freed from terrible work, where where every person would have a chance to cultivate their unique gifts, their unique essence, without any conscription or force being pushed upon them, and so on. Please remember to like this video and subscribe to see more like it. Yeah, so here we are today. While it's easy to see only the horrors of AI, I think we also need to focus on the very real ways that AI could support collective human liberation, and that this could actually be precedented and even amazing.
And I know that to see this we're going to have to think about a deep structural transformation of our current economic and political order, which obviously is only rewarding a tiny class of oligarchs right now. So yeah, to to get there we would need a massive shift where first we'd have to reach a sort of state of collective awareness about what's being done, what's being prevented with this technology. But before we investigate that, let's go a little bit deeper into the kind of doomer views on AI disruption. As headlines warn of impending mass layoffs, we're hearing tone-deaf corporate leaders frame this disruption as another inevitable phase of modernization. They're advising workers to adapt, reskill, or face irrelevance.
Politicians celebrate the building of massive data centers in their region that will be used to eliminate their constituents' actual livelihoods, while spewing pollution, poisoning water, and depleting all sorts of resources. Data from the International Monetary Fund tells us that roughly 40% of global employment is exposed to AI disruption in the near term. And this is a figure that actually surges to 60% in advanced economies. Whole sectors are facing near total transformation or elimination, such as like call center work or something. Studies indicate that up to 80% of customer service positions, almost 50% of administrative duties, 44% of legal tasks, these are all very vulnerable to immediate automation via AI.
And yeah, as I mentioned, in the tech sector we've already seen tens of thousands of corporate layoffs directly tied to AI adoption, alongside a massive contraction in entry-level hiring. So this is a structural transformation that's actually already happening that threatens to erase the bottom rungs of the ladder that lead to white-collar professional advancement and secure careers. And we know that college graduates get this and they're furious. They're screaming at Eric Schmidt and booing these sort of graduate speakers who try to force AI on them and so on. Then you have the tech investor and AI CEO Emad Mostaque writing about this rupture that were that's happening now in his book The Last Economy.
Mostaque defines our current era as an intelligence inversion, a period in which artificial intelligence transforms human intellect from something precious into something cheap into a hyper-abundant commodity. He asserts that we've entered a thousand-day window to completely reconfigure our economic models before the old engines of work and meaning collapse entirely. In his public diagnosis of this transition, Mostaque delivers a very severe warning about the coming devaluation of human output. He writes, "In the next 1,000 days, AI will not only replace a startling number of humans in the workforce, it will make the entire structure of our economy obsolete." He argues that within teams dominated by automated networks, human cognitive later labor doesn't go to zero in value, it actually goes negative. Yeah, Mostaque is just among, you know, a number of experts issuing these warnings.
Then you have other technologists who are worried that AI could lead to human extinction. They compare the risks in this technology to nuclear war or global pandemics or climate change. Uh we're building entities that are smarter than ourselves, and this means we're risking losing control over our own destiny. Then as we also know, AI's physical footprint, I mean, it seems like an ethereal technology, but actually requires a lot of physical goods, comes with massive ecological costs. Data centers are requiring millions of gallons of water daily to cool their processors. They're taking resources from regions already suffering from droughts. So, as AI is taking away everybody's job, it also threatens to make the planet uninhabitable for the future.
And, you know, there's other crises within these crises. There's the the insidious threat of widespread cognitive decline. We're seeing that the rapid integration of AI into our educational systems is leading to atrophy, sort of intellectual atrophy. When we outsource our thinking to algorithmic models, yeah, we induce laziness, sort of mental collapse. Recent behavioral research highlights a negative correlation between reliance and generative AI and critical thinking capacity. They're talking about chronic cognitive offloading. Well, older adults tend to use AI to delegate tasks that they may already understand pretty well. Young people just substitute AI for skills they've never learned in the first place. According to a study in Psychological in Psychology Today, adults who offload thinking to AI lose capacity they built, but children may never build it at all.
A study 2026 study looked at software developers loading a new code library. Uh they found the developers who delegated their job to an AI assistant, yeah, they were able to generate working code, but then they failed conceptual understanding tests. So, they got the output, but they lacked the knowledge they would have gained from actually going through the process. So, yeah, what's going to happen when an entire generation relies on LLMs to process information where independent reasoning gets replaced by just statistical biases or the biases kind of added to the AI systems by their oligarchic owners. So, the danger is that we train ourselves towards a state of uncritical compliance, mistaking algorithmic fluency for genuine, authentic human intellect.
Okay, so all of that is bad and it's all happening, but you know, we can still see it's not the only possible outcome. For instance, instead of causing cognitive decline, AI, if it was used properly, really could provide the most powerful learning tool humanity has ever developed. But I I use it for learning new things all the time. I'm sure you do, too. And um yeah, we we basically we need to master the tool instead of getting subjugated by it. So, here's the question. Why do we view the automation of labor up to and including cognitive labor as a tragedy rather than a triumph? And here again, if we lived in a truly rational society, wouldn't people be like over the moon, like totally ecstatic that robots can now perform most if not all repetitive, dangerous, and uninspiring tasks?
And we don't want kids working in mines or whatever. Most jobs are really just tedious drudgery. And if we could build machines to automate them, you know, really that should be cause for global celebration. But of course, under our current economic framework, the reduction of necessary human labor results in misery, poverty, precarity, marginalization, despair. Yeah, as we as we live now, our capacity to survive is entirely based on the utility of our abilities to the market. And so, millions and millions end up in what the anthropologist David Graeber called jobs. These are kind of meaningless efforts designed to keep the economic machinery spinning. Then you have a another group that's doing the necessary work in society, from nursing to electricians to trash collectors and so on.
Yet often they're pretty un underpaid compared to the other classes, like the financial speculators. Uh so, those who own the means of production receive massive profits. Why can't we at least envision another possibility? That artificial intelligence could be an amazing engine for human liberation and equality, freeing basically all of us from the burden of degrading and boring labor, eventually opening the gates to an era of universal self-actualization. In fact, amazingly enough, that's what Oscar Wilde predicted over a century ago. His plays and his art interrogated the superficiality of bourgeois morality. In his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, he captured the kind of transactionality and vapidity of modern existence among the ruling elites, writing, "Nowadays, people know the price of everything and the value of nothing." In his social comedies, he weaponized irony.
He exposed the hypocrisies of the ruling class. His, you know, sharp and subversive epigrams remain legendary and haven't lost any of their zing. You know, he made the famous observation that "Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes." He commented that there's only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. Yeah, but as a radical political thinker, Wilde recognized that true individual freedom could never be achieved in a society where private property and forced labor were kind of the law of the land. In his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Wilde argues that the chief advantage of eliminating private property is that it would relieve humanity from the sordid necessity of living for others, which he believed presses very severely on almost everyone.
"Under the current system," he observed, "a lot of people spoil their lives with an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism. They feel compelled to waste their emotional and intellectual energy doing what they can to alleviate the hidden hideous poverty, ugliness, and starvation they see around them." Of course, now we have a lot of uh very wealthy people who don't even pretend to do that anymore. But yeah, Wilde believed that these charitable remedies don't ever really cure the the social disease at its root. And instead, they merely prolong it, and they're kind of an evasion of, you know, the real task, which would be to try to reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. Wilde compares well-meaning philanthropists to to sort of gentle and kind slave owners who were, you know, good to their slaves in certain ways, but this actually prevented the horror of the system from being realized by those who suffered from it, and also kind of salved the bad conscience of the slave owners.
Wilde believed that the true purpose of society is not the accumulation of wealth or material goods, but the development of the individual. He saw that true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is. Private property, he argues, has corrupted individualism by confusing a person with their possessions, and this leads people to believe that the most important thing is to have rather than to be. This preoccupation with property forces the rich to exhaust themselves with the burdens of ownership and management. While it reduces the poor to beasts of burden, living on the brink of starvation, and denied the capacity to engage in culture, refinement, or find joy.
Wilde quipped, "If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it, but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich, we must get rid of it." So, very interestingly, what Wilde back in the 1890s recognized that the eventual development of technology would be the only way we could resolve the inherent conflict between human freedom and social necessity. He saw that civilization requires the execution of degrading tasks like sweeping streets, mining coal, performing sanitary services, and so on. And yeah, in the ancient world, these terrible tasks were lifted from the citizens. Not actually terrible tasks, but tasks that most people would rather not do, were lifted from the citizen by by human slavery.
And of course, that was morally ruinous as well as insecure. Yeah, and just evil, basically. Wilde's uh radical insight was, quote, "On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends." He writes that, quote, "All unintellectual labor, all monotonous dull labor, all labor that deals with dreadful things and involves unpleasant conditions must in the future be done by machinery." So, he had a vision where machines would be, you know, the stokers of steamers, cleaning the streets and the toilets, you know, bearing messages on wet days. And meanwhile, humanity would enjoy what Wilde called cultivated leisure. We would make the beautiful things or read the beautiful things or simply contemplate the world with admiration and delight while our machines would do all the necessary and unpleasant work.
So amazingly, although we can't really see it right now because of the dangers, this is actually the potential that AI offers us today. This AI represents a massive repository of synthetic, cognitive, and advanced robotics physical labor that could take over the administrative and physical drudgery that can consume so much of people's lives. AI is the arrival of the mechanical slave that that Wilde prophesied and hoped for. And I know that, you know, some people will counter this by saying that work is what gives life meaning or whatever. Personally, I don't think that truism is actually true or that it holds up. I mean, I completely think that people do need a mission and purpose, which can come from any aspects of life, spirituality or family or whatever or creativity.
It can be related to their intimate relationships, their their creative efforts, their their hobbies, their curiosities, or their, you know, wanting to look deeper into the nature of consciousness and explore other states of consciousness. But I've been around a while now and I've never found anybody with a trust fund who yearns to be liberated from their financial freedom so they can work in a factory or cleaning houses or as an accountant. So, honestly, people just get along very well without being forced to work and and much better than being forced to work. So, the belief that work itself somehow generates meaning, that's just a convenient lie of capitalist society because capitalism requires kind of mass conscripted labor to perpetuate itself. But if AI is bringing capitalism to an end, then we're somewhere else.
A utopian future of cultivated leisure is a structural impossibility under our current social economic model. If automated systems are owned and controlled by a small oligarchy of tech corporation investors, we can see the benefits of of AI are not going to be distributed to the public. Profits will continue to concentrate at the top as we're already seeing, and the increasingly displaced workforce or precariat will be cast out into poverty and homelessness and insecurity. So yeah, I mean, under capitalism is a machine that does the work of 500 people, sadly just simply throws that 500 people out of their jobs leaving them to starve or seek other work while the single owner secures that entire surplus. I think it's really important to remember that capital in the end is what the political philosopher Antonio Negri called a social relation.
In a way that's all it is, right? In a time of crisis, the system that assigns economic value could be dramatically redesigned to suit the needs of of the large mass of people. So here in the US, we've reached a point where three individuals control more wealth than 50% of the population with many facing deep economic precarity. They've got tons of debt, they're dealing with food insecurity. And yeah, so if we had a more equitable real- reallocation of resources, it would be profoundly beneficial for the vast majority of people in the society and even across the world. But unfortunately, to realize this liberatory potential of artificial intelligence, America and other countries, we need a profound political and economic shift in the direction of, you know, Wild called it socialism.
And of course, the idea of socialism has been demonized by society that's organized around private control of resources, private control of everything at this point. But for Wild, socialism did not mean some kind of authoritarian state governed governed by economic tyranny. In fact, he warned that would make what he called the last state of man worse than the first. Rather, what he was hoping for, which I think, you know, I I share this hope, would be a voluntary association where the state organizes labor and resources and acts as the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities. It would ensure that each member of the community shares in the general prosperity.
Yeah, so under this kind of framework, useful things would be supplied by collective organizations, sort of basic things, leaving the individual entirely free to create what is beautiful and to develop their own personality without coercion. So yeah, I mean, I think this is the irony. AI is the ultimate tool of capitalist rationality, but in the end, just by its own logic, it's going to force us potentially to decouple human survival from market utility. The massive gains in productivity that seem like they're going to be generated by artificial intelligence, I know there's still some questions around it, should be used to provide public wealth rather than just more private capitalization. And this would mean we would need to reorganize our society and our economic system to transform this threat of total unemployment and destruction, sort of this wrecking ball, into a possibility of universal liberation, a plan for that.
And if this sounds utopian now, we have to remember that progress, as Oscar Wilde observed, is always the realization of utopias. I mean, mass consumerism, capitalism, was once a distant utopia that humanity managed to achieve, and now we enjoy a proliferation of goods. We can try exotic fruits from all over the world and so on. And this is not something that people 500 years ago would even have imagined as possible, but you know, they they maybe yearned for this. And today, we need to liberate ourselves from the dictates of a brutally exploitative, inhuman system that is kind of preventing our own emancipation. And AI and robotics, what Wilde called mechanical slavery, they could provide the means for doing that.
So we're looking at our next utopian threshold if we dare to cross it. Thanks for listening today. Please, if you enjoyed this video, subscribe to the channel, like it, and share it with your friends. Have a great day.
Transcript of the video essay, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.