Despite Elon Musk’s efforts to turn the entire written internet into Stormfront, the conversation on Twitter and Bluesky still runs through the media and the academy. And the escalating nastiness on these sites comes in part, I believe, from the precarity increasingly felt by workers in what we’ll loosely and somewhat artlessly call “knowledge fields.” These professions weren’t doing particularly well before Artificial Intelligence, and employees in these fields are deeply worried now. The actual ability of Artificial Intelligence to replace such jobs almost doesn’t matter, because nearly every corporation or university will have someone on staff ready to convince a C-suite executive or a chancellor that, if they do not replace some of their fallible and whiny employees with robots, they will die a quick and humiliating death.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker

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Relatedly, the media’s coverage of itself and the academy will become even more annoying, until it consumes much of the industry—soon, every other story will be about a woke professor who spent his department’s budget on the racial dynamics of Labubus or whatever. Perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration, but I do think that the humans left in the industry will only get more self-obsessed and cloistered as the shutters hit the ground.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker

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People like to go to work. They like to interact with humans. Many workers are older and have grown used to certain ways of doing business. That won’t all go away just because Claude is standing outside your office waiting for word to kick you out.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker

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