You are not denying the scale of AI change, you’re calling out the moral emptiness of how too many people talk about it. That matters. Fear can wake people up, but fear without solidarity, agency or a believable human future is just theatre with a body count.
The strongest bit for me is the core argument that human worth cannot be reduced to “AI productivity.” That is the line too many techno-prophets blunder straight past while congratulating themselves for being realistic. Progress that strips out dignity is not progress. It is just acceleration with better branding.
We need less apocalypse cosplay, more grown-up leadership. Build the tools, yes. But also build a future ordinary people can actually imagine living in.
Thanks for this, Judith – I believe language fundamentally shapes our reality and the argument you make here is really strong. I've been on maternity leave from my tech job since October last year and have had a few moments of panic based on these incendiary "you're getting left behind!" posts on top of the usual "is everyone forgetting about me" mat leave feelings.
I've been thinking a lot about this growing paradox at the centre of so much AI discourse: the fact that we’re being told to adapt faster and faster, while our sense of who we are still forms slowly.
Beyond job displacement, there's the growing psychological dimension of people losing their sense of orientation within systems accelerating faster than humans are built for.
Judith, what I like about your piece is that it locates the problem where it actually lives: not in the technology, but in the worldview of the people narrating it.
I've been exploring exactly this in my book on Adam Smith and his relevance for now, The Moral Market: Adam Smith and the Promise of Virtuous Capitalism. What you're calling the technocentric worldview has a long pedigree. Mandeville argued in the eighteenth century that private appetites, left to their its own logic, generates public good, and that moral evaluation is therefore a distraction from the serious business of progress. The rageposters and fearmongerers are his inheritors.
What Smith understood, and what the current discourse has almost entirely forgotten, is that commerce is not a system for the aggregation of capability. It's a system for the expression of human sociability. Strip out the moral foundations and what remains isn't a more efficient market. It's a more predatory one.
Where I'd push your argument further is on institutions. Articulation without institutional design is aspiration without architecture. Every previous contraction of humanity's cosmic significance was met not just with philosophical recalibration but with new institutions to protect people from the concentrated power that disruption always rewards in the short term. The question isn't only what story we tell about AI. It's what we're actually prepared to build alongside it.
Technological advancement is not the same as human progress. Smith would have agreed immediately, and then asked what we propose to do about it.
I can’t say I’m surprised. Individuals and movements associated with AI, whether people like Elon or the Effective Altruists or the Longtermists, have documented tendencies to view intelligence through the language of eugenics. Others like Thiel or Balaji Srinivasan advocate to replace American governance with techno-fascist monarchy. Is it any wonder leaders with such views are pushing an AI narrative that devalues human life?
The Industrial Revolution was a technological transformation that similarly devalued human existence. Workers, including children, were exposed to highly hazardous working conditions for low pay. Life expectancy didn’t rise for decades even after industrialization took off. Factory owners would partner with the state to suppress strikes violently and ruthlessly. We are witnessing such cruelty again at the hands of today’s robber barons.
I agree and have been choosing a harsh tone in most of my public speaking BUT always in combination with: here's why you still matter. None of your worth is diminished because intelligence is being automated - our worth always exists. Our identity and the way we get to know ourselves, build status in society etc - all of that will change. No question about it. But just telling folks there will be a permanent underclass, just make sure you're not a part of it is cruel and socially unambitious
A brilliant piece on an essential conversation. For human beings to survive and thrive, our dignity has to be at the center of technological advancement and not the other way around. I have always maintained that technologists cannot be 'left to their own devices' when the future of humanity is at stake.
The "-centric" part of this piece led me to think about what it is for this moment. We are all talking about AI, so it seems that is our new "center."
We think we are talking about a technology but when we talk about AI, we are still talking about work. AI arose as a machine from and for the workplace. What AI and the various primary conversations around it reveal is that humans have lost sensing as their center. Every complaint about "what AI is doing" is a conversation about how AI is simply revealing, magnifying, and amplifying where we either never had sensing or lost it as the entity in charge of the very systems and machines we complain about.
In almost every discussion about the future of AI and robotics, the conversation quickly turns to one thing: MONEY.
How will AI companies make money? How will businesses use AI to increase profits? How can individuals use AI to earn more? What happens to workers and jobs? How will people pay their bills?
Money, money, money. The assumption is that it will remain the organizing principle of society.
Underlying all these questions is a rarely examined assumption: that the money-based system we live under today will still exist as AI and robots take on more and more of the work humans currently do.
But what if it does not?
If AI becomes highly autonomous and robots or androids perform most productive work, the fundamental reason money exists disappears. Money is essentially a tool for allocating scarcity. We use it because labor, goods, and services are limited, and markets determine how those limited resources are distributed.
But imagine a world where machines can produce most of what people need, including food, goods, energy, and infrastructure, at massive scale with minimal human input. In such a system, scarcity could shrink dramatically.
In that world, wages start to lose meaning. Profit becomes harder to define. Stocks, bonds, and crypto all depend on ownership of productive assets and competition for financial returns. If production becomes largely automated and abundant, those structures may no longer function the way they do today. Even gold might end up valued more for its appearance than as a store of value.
This is not necessarily science fiction centuries away. It could be only a few decades out.
Yet most discussions about AI remain locked inside today’s framework. People working jobs, earning wages, investing money, and accumulating assets.
The real disruption from AI may not simply be better tools inside our current economic system.
It may be the end of the system itself.
And the biggest question may not be technological at all. Can eight billion people successfully navigate a transition this radical?
This really lands.
You are not denying the scale of AI change, you’re calling out the moral emptiness of how too many people talk about it. That matters. Fear can wake people up, but fear without solidarity, agency or a believable human future is just theatre with a body count.
The strongest bit for me is the core argument that human worth cannot be reduced to “AI productivity.” That is the line too many techno-prophets blunder straight past while congratulating themselves for being realistic. Progress that strips out dignity is not progress. It is just acceleration with better branding.
We need less apocalypse cosplay, more grown-up leadership. Build the tools, yes. But also build a future ordinary people can actually imagine living in.
Thanks for this, Judith – I believe language fundamentally shapes our reality and the argument you make here is really strong. I've been on maternity leave from my tech job since October last year and have had a few moments of panic based on these incendiary "you're getting left behind!" posts on top of the usual "is everyone forgetting about me" mat leave feelings.
Brilliant piece, thank you!
Great piece.
I've been thinking a lot about this growing paradox at the centre of so much AI discourse: the fact that we’re being told to adapt faster and faster, while our sense of who we are still forms slowly.
Beyond job displacement, there's the growing psychological dimension of people losing their sense of orientation within systems accelerating faster than humans are built for.
Judith, what I like about your piece is that it locates the problem where it actually lives: not in the technology, but in the worldview of the people narrating it.
I've been exploring exactly this in my book on Adam Smith and his relevance for now, The Moral Market: Adam Smith and the Promise of Virtuous Capitalism. What you're calling the technocentric worldview has a long pedigree. Mandeville argued in the eighteenth century that private appetites, left to their its own logic, generates public good, and that moral evaluation is therefore a distraction from the serious business of progress. The rageposters and fearmongerers are his inheritors.
What Smith understood, and what the current discourse has almost entirely forgotten, is that commerce is not a system for the aggregation of capability. It's a system for the expression of human sociability. Strip out the moral foundations and what remains isn't a more efficient market. It's a more predatory one.
Where I'd push your argument further is on institutions. Articulation without institutional design is aspiration without architecture. Every previous contraction of humanity's cosmic significance was met not just with philosophical recalibration but with new institutions to protect people from the concentrated power that disruption always rewards in the short term. The question isn't only what story we tell about AI. It's what we're actually prepared to build alongside it.
Technological advancement is not the same as human progress. Smith would have agreed immediately, and then asked what we propose to do about it.
I can’t say I’m surprised. Individuals and movements associated with AI, whether people like Elon or the Effective Altruists or the Longtermists, have documented tendencies to view intelligence through the language of eugenics. Others like Thiel or Balaji Srinivasan advocate to replace American governance with techno-fascist monarchy. Is it any wonder leaders with such views are pushing an AI narrative that devalues human life?
The Industrial Revolution was a technological transformation that similarly devalued human existence. Workers, including children, were exposed to highly hazardous working conditions for low pay. Life expectancy didn’t rise for decades even after industrialization took off. Factory owners would partner with the state to suppress strikes violently and ruthlessly. We are witnessing such cruelty again at the hands of today’s robber barons.
Fully agree but at the same time I'm struggling a bit. In our Tech Bubble this is valid.
Outside the bubble I have the feeling people are not understanding what is actually coming and a little "harsh" language might wake them up.
Not sure how you see this?
I agree and have been choosing a harsh tone in most of my public speaking BUT always in combination with: here's why you still matter. None of your worth is diminished because intelligence is being automated - our worth always exists. Our identity and the way we get to know ourselves, build status in society etc - all of that will change. No question about it. But just telling folks there will be a permanent underclass, just make sure you're not a part of it is cruel and socially unambitious
A brilliant piece on an essential conversation. For human beings to survive and thrive, our dignity has to be at the center of technological advancement and not the other way around. I have always maintained that technologists cannot be 'left to their own devices' when the future of humanity is at stake.
Loved reading this Judith!
The "-centric" part of this piece led me to think about what it is for this moment. We are all talking about AI, so it seems that is our new "center."
We think we are talking about a technology but when we talk about AI, we are still talking about work. AI arose as a machine from and for the workplace. What AI and the various primary conversations around it reveal is that humans have lost sensing as their center. Every complaint about "what AI is doing" is a conversation about how AI is simply revealing, magnifying, and amplifying where we either never had sensing or lost it as the entity in charge of the very systems and machines we complain about.
Human sensing needs to be recentered.
If you want optimistic, positive AI futures, go here:
https://metatrends.substack.com/
In almost every discussion about the future of AI and robotics, the conversation quickly turns to one thing: MONEY.
How will AI companies make money? How will businesses use AI to increase profits? How can individuals use AI to earn more? What happens to workers and jobs? How will people pay their bills?
Money, money, money. The assumption is that it will remain the organizing principle of society.
Underlying all these questions is a rarely examined assumption: that the money-based system we live under today will still exist as AI and robots take on more and more of the work humans currently do.
But what if it does not?
If AI becomes highly autonomous and robots or androids perform most productive work, the fundamental reason money exists disappears. Money is essentially a tool for allocating scarcity. We use it because labor, goods, and services are limited, and markets determine how those limited resources are distributed.
But imagine a world where machines can produce most of what people need, including food, goods, energy, and infrastructure, at massive scale with minimal human input. In such a system, scarcity could shrink dramatically.
In that world, wages start to lose meaning. Profit becomes harder to define. Stocks, bonds, and crypto all depend on ownership of productive assets and competition for financial returns. If production becomes largely automated and abundant, those structures may no longer function the way they do today. Even gold might end up valued more for its appearance than as a store of value.
This is not necessarily science fiction centuries away. It could be only a few decades out.
Yet most discussions about AI remain locked inside today’s framework. People working jobs, earning wages, investing money, and accumulating assets.
The real disruption from AI may not simply be better tools inside our current economic system.
It may be the end of the system itself.
And the biggest question may not be technological at all. Can eight billion people successfully navigate a transition this radical?