I don't think AI can do your job (but I do think an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job). However, there is a class of workers whose jobs can be performed perfectly by AI: workers with bullshit jobs:
AI and the Human Condition
AI might replace all of the jobs; that’s only a problem if you think that humans will care, but if they care, they will create new jobs.
Pluralistic: IP can’t save you from AI (18 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
You don't have to believe that AI "art" is any good (I don't), nor do you have to believe that AI "art" can be any good (I don't) to understand that the reason that the capital markets are putting trillions into AI is that they believe they can fire workers of every kind and replace them with AI:
Pluralistic: AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers (27 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
On a recent This Machine Kills episode, guest Hagen Blix described the ultimate form of "AI therapy" with a "human in the loop":
Pluralistic: “Rights for robots” and the AI slavery fantasy (10 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
While the AI bubble is primarily a material phenomenon (driven by the calculation that bosses are easy marks for a sales pitch that sees them replacing workers with software), there is an inescapable ideological component to it: the desire for a world without people in it:
Pluralistic: How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses (16 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
There's lots of reasons to believe the "hyperscaler" model of AI can never be profitable, and not just because of its gigantic expenditures and negative unit economics (the companies lose money with every new customer and every new use, and they lose more money with each generation of their products):
Pluralistic: AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers (27 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Now, it's true that eventually, the machines improved and the fabric they turned out matched and exceeded the quality of the fabric that
Pluralistic: AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot (04 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
It's easy to understand why some programmers love their AI assistants and others loathe them: the former group get to decide how and when they use AI tools, while the latter has AI forced upon them by bosses who hope to fire their colleagues and increase their workload.
Pluralistic: The ordinariness of evil (19 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Maybe it seems weird that AI bosses won't stop publicly rending their garments about the terrible potential of their products, from the jobspocalypse that will ensue when AI can do our jobs better than us, to the impending moment when the word-guessing programs learn too many words, wake up and turn us all into paperclips.
Pluralistic: AI solipsists and AI cynics (24 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
As a technology, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's applications "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology:
AI tools are 'deskilling' workers, philosophy professor says
A philosophy professor warns that AI reliance is weakening workers' judgment, creativity, and problem-solving.
BREAKING: Stanford just surveyed 1,500 workers and AI experts about which jobs AI will actually replace and automate. Turns out, we've been building AI for all the WRONG jobs. Here's what they discovered: (hint: the "AI takeover" is happening backwards)
BREAKING: Stanford just surveyed 1,500 workers and AI experts about which jobs AI will actually replace and automate.Turns out, we've been building AI for all the WRONG jobs.Here's what they discovered:(hint: the "AI takeover" is happening backwards) pic.twitter.com/2nX8UMdaBh— Ruben Hassid (@rubenhassid) June 17, 2025
Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t
Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kappor take on the question of AI job losses through the lens of a profession that is uniquely suited to AI disruption - software engineering. In …
Pluralistic: When AI prophecy fails (29 Oct 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Amazon made $35 billion in profit last year, so they're celebrating by laying off 14,000 workers (a number they say will rise to 30,000). This is the kind of thing that Wall Street loves, and this layoff comes after a string of pronouncements from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy about how AI is going to let them fire tons of workers.
Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes
Companies that rushed to replace human labor with AI are now shelling out to have IRL workers to fix the technology's screwups.
Pluralistic: Google’s AI pricing plan (21 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Google is spending a lot on AI, but what's not clear is how Google will make a lot from AI. Or, you know, even break even. Given, you know, that businesses are seeing zero return from AI: