Post
AI is exposing the deep absurdity of late capitalism. Much of the economy in the West consists of what Graeber called bullshit jobs which are roles that even people performing them struggle to justify. I’d argue these types of jobs are uniquely vulnerable to replacement by AI.
🧵 1/4
Such jobs produce nothing of tangible, material value. Building a bridge or diagnosing an illness requires engagement with physical and ethical reality. You are accountable to laws of physics, to human bodies, to measurable outcomes. That sort of a job is going to require a human in the loop. A tool can be helpful for the worker, but the final decision needs to be made by a person who can be held responsible. There is little chance that AI, in the form we have today, can replace such jobs.
2/4
Much of the modern service and knowledge economy operates in a realm of manufactured meaning. Marketing campaigns, branding, corporate compliance, and middle management layers are roles built around persuasion, perception, and bureaucratic performance. They generate what Baudrillard would call simulacra. These are outputs detached from real use-value. AI, as a sophisticated pattern matcher, thrives here precisely because the work was already semantically hollow.
3/4
So, while capitalism created these roles to absorb surplus labor and sustain consumption, AI now reveals their contingency. The real contradiction here is between value and bullshit. It is between work that sustains society and work that just sustains the system.
4/4
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