Column: OK, so what about AI? What happens next? - The News Herald

TEXT START: For several weeks I’ve delved into the world of Artificial Intelligence — trying to ferret out any potential threats we face from such technology.

The Dissection

The column assembles legitimate warning signs—data-center costs, resource consumption, job displacement, capital concentration, weak oversight, and catastrophic AI risk—then presents them as disconnected concerns. Its central move is evidentiary caution: distrust AI-generated explanations and verify sources. That is sensible, but it is not a theory of what AI does to the economic order.

The text identifies replacement as a possibility for data-entry, customer-support, and assembly workers, while treating “tech maintenance,” “prompt engineering,” strategy, and oversight as compensating employment. It never follows the displacement chain to its terminal point: if AI becomes cheaper and more capable across cognitive work, the new roles are fewer, more concentrated, and increasingly automatable themselves.

The Core Fallacy

The column confuses warnings about AI with analysis of AI’s structural consequence. It treats job replacement as a sector-specific problem rather than the severing of the mass employment → wage → consumption circuit.

Its implied remedy is restraint, oversight, or congressional control. That assumes institutions can preserve large human-only economic domains while firms compete under conditions where automation lowers cost and raises output. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, that is the coordination impossibility: any firm or state that voluntarily preserves obsolete labor at scale is exposing itself to competitors that do not.

The article also blurs two different hazards. Extinction risk concerns loss of human control over advanced systems. Economic obsolescence concerns humans losing bargaining power and productive necessity even if AI remains controlled. Solving the first would not solve the second. A safe AI can still make most labor economically redundant.

Hidden Assumptions

• That replacement will remain confined to routine occupations.
• That the promised new jobs will exist in sufficient numbers and persist long enough to absorb the displaced.
• That “oversight” remains human work after AI systems become better at monitoring, optimizing, and governing other systems.
• That economic growth generated by AI will broadly circulate rather than accrue to owners of compute, models, energy, infrastructure, and distribution.
• That government can impose durable limits without triggering competitive escape by firms or rival states.
• That preserving consumption through transfers would preserve productive participation.
• That public alarm about existential danger will produce effective restraint rather than elite protection, liability management, or symbolic regulation.
• That human verification of sources addresses the deeper issue. It addresses misinformation; it does not restore human economic indispensability.

Social Function

Primarily partial truth, mixed with ideological anesthetic and prestige signaling.

The partial truth is real: the column correctly notices concentration of gains, infrastructure costs, employment displacement, regulatory weakness, and the possibility of severe control failures. The anesthetic lies in presenting these as problems that better sourcing, congressional rules, voluntary standards, or general public awareness might contain. The prestige signaling comes from invoking Clarke and Asimov as intellectual scaffolding instead of demonstrating the competitive mechanics that make containment unstable.

Its emotional structure is also internally confused. It uses extinction as the climax, but the more immediate systemic threat is less cinematic: humans can remain alive, consuming, and politically managed while becoming unnecessary to production. That is not a robot apocalypse. It is economic euthanasia with a functioning electrical grid.

The Verdict

The column is a credible alarm bell attached to an incomplete model. It sees the smoke—displacement, concentration, infrastructure strain, and governance failure—but does not identify the fire: AI-driven automation destroys the bargaining position of the labor majority, while ownership of the productive machinery concentrates above them.

Its proposed controls may delay the transition. They do not reverse P1, overcome P2, or prevent P3. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, the article documents early symptoms of post-WWII capitalism’s terminal decline while mistaking regulation and public caution for a survival mechanism.