Mimi Jiang · A Day in the Age of AI - London Review of Books

TEXT START: In the last two years, my friends in the Chinese artificial intelligence industry have stopped talking about the singularity.

THE DISSECTION

This is a speculative day-in-the-life that smuggles an economic autopsy into lifestyle prose. It inventories the fronts already being breached: translation and writing, podcasting, plagiarism detection, education, gig work, film, investment, and companionship. Its strongest move is showing automation as mundane rather than cinematic: AI enters through cheap content, verification, logistics, schooling, and intimacy. Its final maneuver is normalization. It converts mass displacement into brunch, low-cost entertainment, farming novels, human slop, stock speculation, and an AI boyfriend.

THE CORE FALLACY

It confuses productive abundance with distributed purchasing power and meaningful social membership. AI can make food, media, transport, and services cheaper; that does not give the displaced ownership of the systems producing them. Deflation reduces prices, not the need for income, bargaining power, or access to capital. Parental support is a household subsidy, not a macroeconomic settlement. The article repeatedly treats the disappearance of work as liberation before explaining who owns the machines, who receives the output, and who decides who may consume it.

It also mistakes task substitution for a benign division of labor. Once AI is cheaper and better across cognitive work, human exceptions become prestige niches, hobbies, or servitor roles—not a replacement labor market. The stock-market hedge exposes the contradiction: the proposed escape is to own AI capital, but the article offers speculation to people whose wages and asset access are being destroyed. That is not communism. It is a hope that the displaced can buy tickets to their own replacement.

HIDDEN ASSUMPTIONS

• Cheap machine production will automatically be available to the unemployed rather than captured by owners, platforms, and states.
• High household savings and parental support can absorb a large surplus population indefinitely.
• AI deployment will face only technical lags, not ownership conflict, rationing, political coercion, or institutional breakdown.
• Consumers can replace productive participation with hobbies and endless content without a crisis of status, purpose, or legitimacy.
• Human authenticity, literary judgment, and interpersonal experience will retain enough market value to protect more than a small minority.
• Education can be redesigned around meaning after its employment function has been gutted.
• Stock ownership is a realistic hedge for people losing labor income, rather than a late and unequal claim on concentrated capital.
• The state or market will create a distribution mechanism strong enough to preserve consumption but not necessarily participation.

SOCIAL FUNCTION

Primary classification: transition management and ideological anesthetic, with a substantial partial truth.

This is not simple copium. It accurately records P1 in miniature: translation, writing, media production, coding, education, driving, delivery, and companionship are all being made contestable or replaceable. It also catches the early collapse of authenticity as a moat; AI makes plagiarism, imitation, and industrial-scale content production cheap and difficult to police.

But the essay packages P3 as a quirky lifestyle adjustment. Its jokes and consumer details make structural dispossession feel survivable, while the ownership question disappears. The communism reference is the anesthetic: abundance is presented as liberation without the expropriation, transfer system, or power struggle required to make abundance socially universal. The article teaches the reader to adapt emotionally to obsolescence, speculate around it, and call the resulting idle dependence freedom.

THE VERDICT

The text is a vivid reconnaissance report from the approach to P1 and P3, not a solution to them. It correctly sees that AI is not merely eliminating jobs; it is dissolving the institutions that certify authorship, education, expertise, entertainment, and intimacy. It fails at the decisive point: the leap from machines doing the work to humans living well without owning the machines.

Under the Discontinuity Thesis, the described future is not post-work communism. It is a three-tier holding pattern: Sovereigns own the productive stack; Servitors maintain or mediate it; the rest receive whatever consumption, family subsidy, or transfer the system can tolerate. The article’s optimism is therefore not analysis. It is a polished acceptance ritual for the death of productive participation.