silverguide.site –

Everything we hear about artificial intelligence is conflicting, and hearing about it feels inescapable. AI is terrible. AI is wonderful. It will break the world. It will transform the future. It’s essential to embrace it. It’s a moral imperative to abstain from using it.

Already, AI is projected to generate nearly unfathomable amounts of revenue. In the last quarter of 2025, it represented nearly 60% of the growth in the US economy. Already, pundits and economists wring their hands about what calamity will befall us if and when the AI bubble bursts.

Since ChatGPT, the first of the large language models, was released in late 2022, more than half a million workers in the tech industry alone have lost their jobs. Any mention of AI tends to be accompanied by warnings that deeper jobs cuts across many more industries are coming for us all. Jensen Huang, CEO of chip giant Nvidia, said in 2025: “Every job will be affected, and immediately. It is unquestionable. You’re not going to lose your job to an AI, but you’re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI.” In January, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted: “AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.”

Increasingly, people young and old flock to a new gold rush in Silicon Valley to toil away on AI-fueled startups. Many of them are driven less by idealistic enthusiasm and more by the dread of missing a ticket for the last train to wealth – and getting stuck forever in the “permanent underclass” that, with any luck, they themselves will create.

What all these divergently apocalyptic ideas hold in common is their AI absolutism – a way of seeing AI as a godlike force that will either hasten a golden age of productivity and innovation, or will doom humanity. It mirrors the political polarization of our era and even the zealotry found in religious fanaticism. This is by design. Contradictory as they may be, all these arguments and anxieties fit neatly into the overarching message of the people building this technology: AI’s dominance is inevitable. Get on board or you will be left behind. The robber barons of our age stand to profit wildly from not only enthusiasm about their star product, but also, the terror of it.

“If you want to justify this enormous valuation in your IPO, you need to point to the revenue stream that you’re going to generate in the future,” said Suresh Naidu, a professor at Columbia University’s department of economics. “You just need to make it look like you have something that can eat all the work on the planet, so that an investor will think: ‘Oh wow, I don’t want to miss out on this thing.’”

Naidu isn’t refuting claims that AI will cut into jobs or upend certain industries. He called the technology “transformative” and said that he uses it every day in his work as a researcher and academic. It’s just that when he zooms out and puts AI and all its attendant promises and warnings in historical context, he sees a lot of hype.

There is no control group

Anil Dash, the former CEO of the startup Glitch, who’s been writing about tech for decades, is also unconvinced that the AI we’re being sold will do all the things tech CEOs are predicting it will do.

“Any technology that you invest like a trillion dollars into is going to be able to do a lot of things, good or bad. [AI is] a leap forward. I don’t think we’ve ever had a machine learning system that can do as many things as this one does,” he said. But “there’s so much noise that it’s hard to tell what the domains of applicability are.” Coding is an exception, he said. It’s easier to test an AI model’s coding output because it will clearly work, or it won’t. Many other applications for the tech are much more subjective and therefore less prone to immediate job replacement.

That’s why the tech industry has made the deepest job cuts so far – though, amid layoffs at companies such as Amazon, Meta and Block, reports from employees have emerged saying the AI productivity gains their bosses trumpet are overblown.

Even the role AI is playing in those layoffs and reductions to entry-level positions isn’t entirely clear. Martin Beraja, a professor at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business who studies technological innovation and business cycles, said recent studies that have drawn connections between the release of ChatGPT and a decline in entry-level software jobs are “problematic”.

There was “a buildup of jobs in [tech] coming out of the pandemic, and once … consumption patterns moved away from online to the real world again, now we had too many people working in the industry that we didn’t really need”, Beraja said.

Some of the biggest and most loudly pro-AI players in tech have arrived at similar conclusions as AI critics. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen proclaimed in March that overstaffed companies are using AI as a “silver-bullet excuse” to clean house. In May, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman retreated on some of his prior claims of massive job replacement by AI, saying: “I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than ​has actually happened.”

And if AI’s worst-case scenario for tech jobs plays out – which would indeed be very bad for many people – that’s still nowhere near the apocalyptic future of labor that many fear. “Is it, in fact, going to destroy all of the jobs?” Naidu asked. “I’m not convinced. Even take software. Software is only about 4 to 6% of GDP. So it’s a lot, but it’s not like the whole economy can be replaced by Claude Code.”

Convincing people that AI will replace human workers in droves is a clever marketing tactic. Not only does it stoke rabid investor speculation, but it distracts from a more realistic application of AI for the global workforce, stretching far beyond the borders of the tech industry: using AI to surveil and micromanage employees to squeeze yet more productivity out of them, all the while pressuring them to feel grateful that they have any kind of work at all. Gig workers, the people who pick you up in Ubers and deliver your food on platforms like DoorDash, have already been the guinea pigs for this kind of algorithmic management, and labor experts predict it will spread.

It can feel like we’re living in an experiment when it comes to the rise of AI. Naidu would like us to update that framing. “An experiment implies a control group of something that’s not affected. There’s no control group here,” he said.

Remember there are alternatives

The version of AI that we’re being sold doesn’t have to be the version we buy. Nor does it need to be the story we believe in.

This isn’t an argument for an abstinence-only relationship with AI, something that has too much in common with evangelical Christianity’s unrealistic stance on premarital sex. Anyone with common sense can see how those kinds of ascetic codes play out in reality. It’s happening already with AI. “AI is just another technology Americans don’t like but can’t stop using,” the Washington Post’s Shira Ovide wrote earlier this year, referring to the polarized divide between polling that shows how much they distrust the tech and numbers of rapid user growth in the past year.

Instead, this is an argument for moderation. Beraja, the UC Berkeley professor, said there’s too much focus on AI as a job replacement technology. Outside a few industries like tech, he said studies show that the most effective ways for people and companies to use AI is not to replace workers, but to learn more, and learn faster.

“Where I think we have to get to is, there can be alternatives,” said Dash. “What we can imagine is, rather than the ChatGPT killer, a lot of different little AIs from little responsible players.” A few are already quietly cropping up, harkening back to earlier and more optimistic days in the internet’s history, and offering a glimpse of what could be possible if people took AI into their own hands.

And for the industries and jobs that AI is upending, upheaval may open the way for a resurgence in worker power as white-collar workers begin to see the appeal of solidarity, whether with colleagues in their office or workers in the blue-collar world.

After all, the Industrial Revolution, an earlier time of great technological transformation that strangely mirrors our current moment, was a key catalyst for the labor movement – even if its wins took time.