Crook: Humans can decide whether AI kills or creates jobs

URL SCAN: Crook: Humans can decide whether AI kills or creates jobs
FIRST LINE: Does artificial intelligence herald soaring prosperity or mass unemployment, political breakdown and Orwellian subjection?

The Dissection: This column performs a ritual of institutional reassurance. It acknowledges a problem, cites academic research to establish credibility, identifies some “policy levers” (R&D, mobility, licensing), and concludes with a soft scolding of politicians for not acting. Its function is to maintain the illusion of a navigable choice.

The Core Fallacy: The Discontinuity Thesis fallacy of Institutional Continuity. The argument assumes the core mechanisms of the 20th-century labor market—where technological displacement is eventually balanced by the creation of “new tasks” requiring human labor—can and will persist. This ignores P1 (Cognitive Automation Dominance). AI is not a tool that augments a fixed human core competency; it is a general-purpose cognitive substrate that can learn and perform any pattern-matching task. “New tasks” will be born automated. The column treats “automation vs. augmentation” as a policy dial we can tweak, not as an outcome dictated by competitive, cost-minimizing logic.

Hidden Assumptions:
1. That there remains a durable domain of “scarce human expertise” that AI cannot replicate or make irrelevant.
2. That the economic system has the capacity (and the will) to redirect investment from maximal profit (automation) toward socially optimal but less profitable ends (human-augmenting “new tasks”).
3. That the time lag for displacement is long enough for “mobility” and “training” to be meaningful solutions for populations, not just elites.

Social Function: Copium / Lullaby. A high-status opinion piece designed to tranquilize professional-managerial class readers. It says, “The experts are on it, the levers exist, this is a management problem.” This is the anesthesia of “better policy” applied to a patient in systemic organ failure.

The Verdict: A textbook example of Lag Defense thinking. It correctly identifies some symptoms (tax bias, licensing) but mistakes them for the disease. The argument is structurally obsolete. It is analyzing the avalanche with the tools of landslide prevention. The “choice” it posits is an illusion; the competitive logic of P1 and the coordination impossibility of P2 mean the system will optimize for automation until the consumption circuit breaks. The column is not a plan; it is a eulogy delivered in the optimistic tone of a keynote address.