A Bhasmasura we built: Can Artificial Intelligence go after its makers? - The South First

TEXT START: Job loss is not new.

The Dissection

This is sophisticated transition-management prose. It admits the dangerous facts—white-collar exposure, quiet displacement, destroyed entry-level pipelines, cost-driven automation, weak worker absorption, and India’s outsourcing vulnerability—then surrounds them with historical analogies, productivity gains, new tasks, and employment projections.

The article is not really asking whether AI will “go after its makers.” AI has no intent. Owners and firms will deploy it against labour costs, including the labour that helped build the systems. The Bhasmasura metaphor therefore obscures the real mechanism: ownership and control, not technological revenge.

The text identifies the approaching fracture but keeps translating a structural question—whether human labour remains economically necessary—into a manageable policy question about reskilling, demand expansion, and transfers.

The Core Fallacy

It treats increased output, new products, and new tasks as if they restore displaced workers’ productive participation. They do not necessarily do so.

Under the Discontinuity Thesis, P1 produces P2, which produces P3: AI becomes superior across cognitive work; institutions cannot preserve human-only economic domains at scale; the majority lose access to economically necessary labour. A growing economy can therefore coexist with falling human necessity, weaker wages, and concentrated ownership.

The article’s “complementarity” argument is mostly a description of temporary shielding. Legal responsibility, face-to-face contact, verification, and judgment may delay substitution, but they are not durable moats if AI can produce the underlying analysis and one human can supervise many systems. The article also recognizes that displaced workers rarely obtain newly created jobs, yet still treats aggregate job creation as the central counterweight.

The decisive omission is ownership. AI can expand demand while transferring the gains to Sovereigns and reducing labour’s bargaining power. UBI or other transfers may preserve consumption, but they do not restore productive participation or economic autonomy.

Hidden Assumptions

• Demand expansion will create enough human work, rather than mostly more AI-mediated output.
• New roles will be accessible to the workers displaced from old ones.
• Reliability, cost, and integration barriers will remain persistent rather than collapse through competitive deployment and feedback.
• Human judgment, verification, moderation, and management will remain large labour bottlenecks instead of becoming highly compressed supervisory functions.
• Firms and governments can coordinate to preserve human employment despite competitive pressure to automate.
• Past transitions are a valid guide despite AI’s greater speed, cognitive scope, and global scalability.
• AI infrastructure constraints are a durable brake rather than a temporary bottleneck.
• Tax-and-transfer systems can remain stable as wage income and labour bargaining power erode.
• “Human involvement” will continue to mean “large-scale human employment.”

Social Function

Classification: partial truth, transition management, and ideological anesthetic.

This is not crude copium. Its strongest passages correctly identify the cost curve, the destruction of stepping-stone jobs, and the fact that historical losers rarely receive the new jobs. But its historical analogies and employment forecasts give institutions a familiar script: invest, adapt, retrain, transfer, wait for new demand.

That script manages public anxiety without confronting the ownership problem. It allows elites to discuss disruption as a difficult transition rather than a transfer of productive power from labour to AI capital.

The Verdict

The article sees the corpse forming but calls it a difficult migration. It documents early P1 and P3, and it recognizes that scale and speed invalidate the comforting historical analogy. Its fatal failure is stopping before the ownership verdict.

AI is not a technological Bhasmasura attacking its creators. It is a cost-reduction engine that lets its owners burn through the wage bargain while preserving the value of the assets. New jobs may appear, but they will not automatically recreate mass productive necessity. Unless people become Sovereigns or indispensable Servitors, transfers are carcass management—not a revival of the post-WWII system.

The supplied text ends mid-sentence during its UBI discussion, so its final policy conclusion is unavailable.