ali on ai ness
ali alattar on ai ness
via the student life 2026 article
student life (from linked article): The Student Life is the oldest college newspaper in Southern California. Founded in 1889, it serves as the newspaper for the Claremont Colleges, a consortium of five liberal art colleges and two graduate schools in Claremont, California. It publishes a newspaper every Friday during the academic year and content online daily.
via nika dubrovsky tweet [https://x.com/nikadubrovsky/status/2081950125304471678?s=20]:
@davidgraeber and #BullshitJobs about AI: automation will reveal that many jobs never needed to exist in the first place.
notes/quotes from article in student life july 2026[]:
OPINION: AI won’t automate work away, it will expose it
By Ali Alattar
If artificial intelligence replaces every job, humans will face a mass disillusionment. It won’t be the humanist disillusionment we expect — the mythologized anticlimax of humankind, a world where machines outperform us at jobs we thought were uniquely ours. Rather, we will realize that those jobs never needed to exist, and more begrudgingly, that no job needs to exist.
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
he thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
In his now infamous op-ed and subsequent book, *“Bullshit Jobs,” anthropologist David Graeber argues that many workers spend their entire working lives devoted to tasks they believe are useless. While Graeber correctly diagnoses what has come to be a phenomenon of the professional class, **he overstates capitalism’s role in producing it. If the age of AI reveals anything, it’s that bullshit work is not so much a symptom of capitalism as it is of humanity.
*bs jobs from birth.. bullshit jobs – dg.. david graeber..
**rather.. of whales ness.. of khan filling the gaps law from the 2 missing pieces
Graeber begins his account with a historical antinomy. He writes that although economist John Maynard Keynes envisioned a feasible 15-hour work week as early as the 1930s, humanity has somehow managed to keep itself busy, 40 hours a week, for nearly a century.
kierkegaard busy ness law.. norton productivity law.. et al
Graeber attributes this largely to the rapid growth of the service and administrative sector, the invention of unnecessary industries and the inflation of existing ones. He argues that these developments produce what he calls “bullshit jobs”: middle-management positions rife with tenuous bureaucratic work.
Though Graeber’s claims are now nearly a decade old, there is good reason to believe them. His ideas have found support in emerging case studies, and become increasingly relevant to a rising class of white-collar tech workers.
In the age of artificial intelligence, his claims materialize in the predicted AI-overhaul of an already superfluous workforce. We might soon realize that the AI craze may ultimately culminate not in the replacement of essential labor, but rather in the automation of jobs that at best never needed to exist, and at worst never truly existed at all.
there’s an even deeper.. legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling).. to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. for (blank)’s sake..
“Bullshit Jobs” is largely a treatise on workplace uselessness, but it also attempts to explain why the phenomenon of bullshit jobs exists in the first place.
Graeber himself blames it on capitalism: he argues that the “ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger” and that the idea that “anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.”
This claim, however, falls flat in an AI era dominated by a winner-take-all race to automate the very “intense work discipline” Graeber speaks of. If the ruling class truly wanted to keep us busy, its many billionaires and one trillionaire would not be pouring this many resources into AI systems deliberately designed to replace the workforce they built to keep us docile.
Instead, even the occupations that may be deemed “useful” and exempt from automation — like being a teacher, a nurse or an electrician — can be just as useless as the administrative claptrap that undergirds them.
In subsequent scholarship on “Bullshit Jobs,” different case studies reported widely different results, with workers’ perceived workplace uselessness ranging from 4.8% to as high as 37% on the same measure. While this divergence can be attributed partly to differences in the surveyed region, it’s also largely based on what questions workers were asked.
Whereas some studies ask participants whether they “have the feeling of doing useful work”, others ask them whether they think they are making a “positive impact on [their] community and society,” with the latter question generally reporting much higher percentages of perceived uselessness than the former across multiple studies.
“Usefulness” need not correlate with real-world impact. The as-yet-speculative AI utopia will force us to come to terms with that understanding in a way we never have before.
the deepest way to understand .. to me.. is to let go of ‘usefulness’ altogether.. to me that’s just part of the whalespeak we’ve perfected..
in a legit free world.. to me.. we would just dance.. with all the speculation/correlation/understanding/whatever ness as irrelevant s
If the replacement of jobs ensues, we will, best case scenario, no longer need to work. Agentic systems will optimize all of society’s critical vocations, agricultural planners, infrastructure operators and doctors alike. The workforce as we know it will be abolished, exposed as the largely self-perpetuating system of inefficiency that it is, and society will become seamless.
graeber min\max law et al.. but we need even deeper.. ie: gershenfeld something else law.. because it has to be all of us for the dance to dance..
Instead, critical thinkers, innovators and artists will begin spawning in such abundance that we may no longer even need more of them.
rather.. we’ll find out we’re all artists..
that’s why we need to do this first: free art\ists et al..
Humanity will then reach their own inflection point just as the machine has, and return to a more animalistic, albeit familiar, form: bullshit. Perhaps we will invent bureaucracies that need not exist or invent questions that need not be asked. In any case, we will be more useless than ever.
i guess this is another way (?) of saying that we’ll keep perpetuating the same song.
According to historian Johan Huizinga, culture largely originates in the human “play” element — an intrinsic drive towards the make-believe that brings rise to law, art, war and the sciences. Perhaps by automating away what was once real, it will be the machine that allows us to play make-believe once again.
to me.. we need to ‘automate away’ sea world.. i’d call it a global detox leap..
because since that day we’ve not legit been real/alive/free/us
the play we need for that rapid global detox.. imagine if we listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance..
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
otherwise we’ll keep perpetuating the same song.. the whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world.. of not-us ness.. of part\ial ness.. perpetuating survival triage.. for (blank)’s sake..
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be you. 