AI isn’t on track to displace millions of jobs. Most of the automation we’re seeing was already possible with existing technology but AI is being slapped on as a buzzword to sell it to the press/executives.

The trend is going the way of NFTs/Blockchain where the revolutionary “everything is going to be changed” theatrical rhetoric meets reality, where it might complement existing technologies but otherwise isn’t that useful on its own.

In programming, we went from “AI will replace everyone!!!” to “AI is a complementary tool for programmers but requires too much handholding to completely replace a trained and educated software engineer when maintaining and expanding software systems”. The same will follow for other industries, too.

Not to say it’s not troubling, but as long as capitalism and wage labour exists, fundamentally we cannot even imagine a technology to totally negate human labour, because without human labour the system would have to contemplate negating fundamental pillars of capital accumulation.

We fundamentally don’t have the language to describe systems that can holistically automate human labour.