AI and automation: The real questions that only a few are asking | The Business Standard

TEXT START: AI came with a huge number of effects, challenges, and future possibilities for our society, politics, state, and even philosophy.

The Dissection

This essay correctly identifies the pressure point: if machines produce goods and services without mass human labor, the wage-to-consumption circuit breaks. It also recognizes Bangladesh’s exposure as a low-skill, externally dependent economy with weak research capacity and vulnerable workers.

Then it retreats. The essay converts structural replacement into a temporary skills mismatch, assuming displaced workers will migrate into services, AI supervision, and research. It treats cultural bias, energy use, data scarcity, and excessive working hours as the central problems. They are real constraints, but they are secondary to ownership and control of the productive system.

Its final proposal—a centralized production system that gives humans free time—is an aspiration, not an analysis of how power transfers from existing owners to everyone else.

The Core Fallacy

The core error is believing that historical labor transitions remain a reliable guide after AI becomes a general cognitive competitor.

The article implicitly assumes that human demand will expand enough to create new employment, that human supervision will remain labor-intensive, and that services are naturally protected from automation. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, those assumptions fail under P1: AI’s advantage is replication, scale, speed, and declining marginal cost across cognitive work. Training, supervision, administration, analysis, and much service labor are themselves automation targets.

It also mistakes a political question for a technical one. The issue is not whether full automation should happen. Competitive pressure drives firms toward cheaper and more capable systems wherever physical and institutional barriers permit. Human preference cannot preserve large human-only economic domains when P2—coordination impossibility—takes hold.

The essay’s dismissal of technofeudalism is another category error. AI does not need to invent monopoly for its consequences to be historically new. Concentrated control over cognition, coordination, data, compute, and automated production can radically intensify pre-existing capital monopolies. Calling monopolies old does not make their AI-enhanced form harmless or unchanged.

Hidden Assumptions

• Service work will remain substantially human because people will not fully trust AI.
• AI training and research will absorb a large share of displaced labor rather than becoming increasingly automated and capital-intensive.
• Expanding or manufactured demand can preserve mass employment indefinitely.
• The human brain’s biological energy efficiency will outweigh AI’s advantages in scale, uptime, reproducibility, and capital deployment.
• National data production can materially close the gap for Bangladesh despite its weak capital and infrastructure.
• Existing institutions can choose a humane transition after productive necessity has already shifted away from most people.
• A different economic model can be implemented without first resolving who owns the machines, energy, logistics, and maintenance systems.

These assumptions conceal the decisive fact: once productive participation collapses under P3, humanitarian concern does not restore bargaining power. Transfers may preserve consumption. They do not restore necessity, status, or control.

Social Function

Primary classification: partial truth functioning as transition management and ideological anesthetic, with some prestige signaling.

The essay is not pure copium. It honestly names the consumption contradiction, dependency risks, environmental extraction, and Bangladesh’s impending vulnerability. But its historical analogies and appeals to adaptation soften the terminal implication. It invites readers to debate human purpose, working hours, and centralized production while postponing the harder questions of ownership, coercion, and mass economic dispensability.

It sees the patient’s circulation failing, then labels the condition a labor-market adjustment problem.

The Verdict

This is a lucid warning with its teeth filed down. It correctly detects that AI threatens the employment-wage-consumption circuit, but misidentifies the crisis as poor adaptation, resource waste, and inadequate policy. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, P1 enables durable cognitive substitution; P2 prevents stable human-only economic refuges; P3 removes the majority from economically necessary labor. The article sees the collapse approaching, but still assumes the old system can negotiate with the force that is making most of its workers unnecessary.