AI interested in you, so be interested in it — Llewellyn King - Jacksonville Journal-Courier

TEXT ANALYSIS: "AI Interested in You, So Be Interested in It"

THE DISSECTION

This is a classic example of transition smoothing propaganda — a piece that acknowledges the severity of AI displacement while systematically routing the analysis toward safe, politically palatable conclusions. It identifies the corpse, then recommends flowers for the funeral. The article gestures at collapse while actively undermining any serious response to it.

THE CORE FALLACY

The "Post-Revolution Expansion" fantasy. King writes that after a "sharp global drop in employment," there will be a "post-revolution expansion of employment that allows for the flourishing of AI and its benefits." This is the central falsehood. It treats the displacement circuit as temporary — a disruption, not an endpoint. The Discontinuity Thesis demolishes this: AI doesn't replace specific jobs and then stop. It severs the mass employment -> wage -> consumption loop permanently by rendering human labor structurally non-competitive across cognitive and then physical domains. The "upturn" Altman envisions is a post-human economy. The employment expansion King imagines is a fantasy about human relevance that no one has demonstrated a mechanism for.

HIDDEN ASSUMPTIONS

1. Human creativity is the exit ramp. King posits that waves of individual entrepreneurs making musical instruments and designing homes from waste products will fill the void. This assumes that creative output at individual scale can substitute for the mass employment infrastructure that currently distributes income. It cannot. The math doesn't work. Creative artisans are not a substitute for 300 million employment relationships.

2. Gig work is the safety net. King floats gig economy expansion as the solution, with easier Social Security access. This is hospice care dressed as opportunity. Gig work is already the precariat — it's the landing zone for the displaced, not a destination that solves the problem of mass economic participation.

3. Work is a psychological need that will save us. King writes "People are built to work. Without work, they get into trouble, deteriorate or go mad." Then uses this as an argument against UBI. But this is circular: if humans need productive work and AI makes productive work unavailable at scale, then the problem is structural, not a reason to reject transfers. King inverts the logic to argue against the only viable transfer mechanism.

4. Government cannot act because of fiscal constraints. "Unlikely" — King dismisses UBI by pointing to existing overspending. This treats the structural failure of the tax base as permanent rather than as evidence that the fiscal architecture itself is being destroyed and must be replaced, not accommodated.

5. Political leadership can catch up. King concludes that politicians need to "catch up" with a new economic order. The DT framework says otherwise: the political class cannot preserve mass employment because the mechanism destroying mass employment is structural, competitive, and global. Regulation won't save it. Policy tweaks won't save it.

SOCIAL FUNCTION

Ideological anesthetic. This piece performs the valuable function of making the collapse sound like an opportunity. It acknowledges job losses while channeling the reader toward gig work, entrepreneurship, and creativity — outcomes that serve the existing power structure by keeping people in precarious individual survival mode rather than demanding structural compensation. It's the economic equivalent of "learn to code" for an era when coding itself is being automated.

The final paragraph — "It would be wonderful to feel that the politicians were aware of it" — is the giveaway. King wants the political class to notice the problem and tweak the framework. This is exactly what the DT says cannot work. The political class is not the solution. It is a lagging indicator of structural collapse.

THE VERDICT

King's piece is competent journalism that arrives at catastrophically wrong conclusions because it refuses to follow the DT logic to its endpoint. It acknowledges the discontinuity while prescribing continuity solutions. It sees the cliff and recommends a slightly more comfortable landing. This is the most dangerous kind of writing: accurate observation deployed to delay rather than prepare for structural transformation. The "post-revolution expansion" is a copium garden. The gig economy is a holding cell. The politicians are not coming. The article treats all three as salvageable.

Classification: Transition management propaganda. Softens the collapse, misdirects the response, leaves readers worse prepared than if they had read nothing at all.