"Onions are good for you" said the onion peddler 8039
(this is a follow up to my previous article "the thief of cope")
Onions are great. Very versatile, easy to grow, and delicious. I like eating onions. But sometimes, I need to cook for guests that can't stand them. I might try to sneak the onions in a sauce or call the guests out on their fraudulent taste-buds. What I never do though, is try to convince them to eat my onions because they are good for their health. It's an easy trick. Appeal to authority. But whose exactly? Who is telling people that onions are good for them? Scientists? But who is paying the scientists to say that? It doesn't take much head scratching to figure out the obvious : it's the onion peddler.
The field of technology is full of onion peddlers, especially those selling “the next big thing”. It doesn’t take that much nooticing to point out that the people making the most egregious predictions about the future are the ones selling the technologies of the future. Often, they are supported by the ones that can bill you to integrate it. It's easy to forget, but these onion peddlers are just selling you their very fancy onions. With classic technologies, the worst that could happen was wasting money on tech that brought little value to a business. From outside, it looked like big companies passing around their money to other big companies. They bought onions because everyone had them in their kitchen. Whether the promised benefits followed was not of much importance. The more money was wasted, the more buzzwords a CEO could cram into his TedTalk. But AI is different. It's not just about a few companies selling their bots to everyone. It's not about a CTO collecting Saas bills like pokemon gym badges to increase his tech-cred. It's not about tricking a bunch of silicon-valley investors to buy a couple of sport cars then closing down the shop. You may have heard the expression "nothing ever happens"? well this time something is actually happening: a massive devaluing of the economic worth of humans.
If you thought that class struggle was a thing of the past, AI will make you look back fondly on slavery. Slaves were needed by their masters; the project of AI is precisely to make you unneeded. Someone watched that Elysium movie and thought we should shoot for that. No more upward mobility through education; there are no jobs to move upward to anymore. Or maybe no more education period. Why train you when we can just train AI instead? The trained AI doesn’t need to be better than you, it just needs to ape you. Your career prospects are already dead, you just don't know it yet. You may be tempted to rationalize why the economic machine still needs you. Fatal mistake. Rationality is a tool that the onion peddler takes out of the shed when it's time to cut down on expenses. The ones who own the economic machine, the ones who steer it, they are not rational. They are emotional, they are class-aware, they have an agenda, and they remember. They hate costs, but they don't hate them equally. You, the human, you're the worst kind of cost. All of these years that the proletariat has been bullying the bourgeois-god-kings with labor laws and fair wage demands... well, it's time for revenge.
We like to think of businesses as systemic entities that follow the rules of a game described in an economics' textbook. But who writes those textbooks? Surprise, it's the onion subsidized friends of the onion peddler. So textbooks will tell you that businesses do everything in their power to maximize profit, but what they won't tell you is that they only maximize profit as far as they can control you. When you think of yourself as essential for the operations of a company, that's control you are taking from them. When you try to unionize, that's control you are taking from them. Remember, control trumps short term profit. Sure, AI might result in a degradation of the quality of the goods and services at first, but that's a price they are willing to pay to get rid of you. Because as a human, you wish for a better tomorrow. Somehow nowadays, that's too greedy. The utopia of the rich is a world without the poor. Literally.
It's a hard pill to swallow, but sugar-coating requires sugar, and the sugar peddler happens to be friends with the onion peddler. Next, we'll discuss why AI cannot innovate, and why MBA suits can’t understand that.
