05/10/26

AI is here. It is not going anywhere. And I need to say something about it that I think most people are getting wrong.

This is no longer a conversation about what might happen. It is happening. Right now. Before our eyes. Countless people I know personally have lost their jobs to AI. Not in the abstract, not as a line item in some McKinsey report about “workforce disruption,” but in the tangible, visceral, rent-is-due sense of the word. Copywriters. Translators. Graphic designers. Journalists. Editors. Gone. Entire departments dissolved overnight and rebuilt around prompts and subscriptions.

I know this because I lived it. Over two years ago, every side-gig writing contract I held evaporated virtually overnight. A whole tributary of income, one I had spent years cultivating, extinguished in a matter of weeks. My work hadn’t declined in quality. The clients were perfectly happy. It simply stopped mattering, because someone figured out they could get something “close enough” for a fraction of the cost by typing a sentence into a chatbot. Close enough. That phrase should haunt all of us.

And the displacement is accelerating. Across the globe, massive data centers are being erected at staggering speed, funded by our tax dollars, subsidized by our labor, and powered by energy grids whose rising costs we absorb in every paycheck and every utility bill. Meanwhile, every prompt we type, every interaction we have with these systems, feeds back into the training data that makes the next version more capable, more efficient, more likely to render another human skill redundant. We are building the thing that replaces us, and we are paying for the privilege. No theory. No forecast from some Silicon Valley futurist hedging his bets on a TED stage. Just the observable present tense.

And yet, I do not hate AI.

I want to be unequivocal about this, because the nuance matters.

I teach. I have foreign students who are brilliant. Not “good for a non-native speaker” brilliant, but genuinely, wildly brilliant. Students whose ideas outpace their English by a mile, students who have spent their entire academic lives trapped behind a language barrier that has nothing to do with the quality of their thinking. For years I watched these students submit work that didn’t reflect a fraction of their intellect. The depth was there. The fluency wasn’t. Now? That barrier is gone. AI handles the grammar, the syntax, the idiom. Their ideas come through clean and clear and devastating. They are finally being evaluated on what they actually think rather than how well they conjugate.

That is a genuinely beautiful thing…and it is also horrific.

Because if a tool can erase the language barrier, it can also erase the need to learn the language. And it will. And it is.

We are already witnessing the early stages of what I think historians will eventually identify as a profound cognitive shift. Entire disciplines (composition, rhetoric, close reading, analytical writing, the slow and difficult art of organizing thought into argument) are being hollowed out. These skills haven’t become obsolete in any meaningful intellectual sense. They’ve simply become optional. And when hard things become optional, most people opt out.

We can already see this playing out with the generation of students who have had access to generative AI throughout nearly their entire high school careers. The decline in baseline literacy and critical thinking is not subtle. It is measurable. Teachers across the country, across the world, are watching it happen in real time: students who cannot construct a thesis statement, who cannot distinguish between a claim and evidence, who cannot read a dense paragraph and extract its meaning. They aren’t stupid, they just never had to. The muscle was never built, because the machine did the lifting from the start.

And here is where it gets complicated, because while this erosion is real, it is anything but uniform. AI is not making everyone dumber. What it is doing is widening a gap that was already there.

The students with more attentive parents, greater financial resources, access to better schools and more engaged mentors: those students are being taught to use AI judiciously. As a brainstorming partner. As a research accelerant. As a drafting tool, not a replacement for thought. They are told: do the hard work first, then use the machine to refine it. They develop the muscle and gain the tool. They come out sharper.

Meanwhile, students without those advantages (students in underfunded schools, students whose parents are working three jobs and don’t have the bandwidth to monitor homework habits, students who were never given a compelling reason to believe their own intellectual development mattered to a system that has never invested in them) take the path of least resistance. Of course they do. The tool is right there. It does the work in seconds. And no one is stopping them. Why would they struggle through an essay when the machine writes a better one in thirty seconds?

But here’s the thing I keep coming back to: this dynamic is not new. When I was a kid, students cheated with Google. Before that, they cheated with CliffsNotes. Before that, they copied from encyclopedias. The ambitious kids, the kids with resources and encouragement, did the hard work anyway. The kids without those things often didn’t. What has changed is not the fundamental choice (it has always been a choice between the difficult and the easy, between genuine growth and the shortcut) but the magnitude of the shortcut. The gap between doing the work and faking it has never been wider, because the tool for faking it has never been this powerful.

So the gap widens. The students who challenge themselves emerge more capable than ever. The students who disengage fall further behind than ever. And the distance between them grows into something that starts to look less like an achievement gap and more like a caste system.

All that being said, this gap is not an AI problem. It is the same gap that has existed since the first human civilization decided that some people’s labor could be owned by others.

It is the gap between those who have and those who do not. Between those born into conditions that nurture ambition and those born into conditions that crush it. And this matters enormously, because affluence and ambition are not merely correlated; they are structurally entangled. Affluence provides ambition the ability to withstand risk. The wealthy child can try and fail and try again, because failure is a lesson, not a catastrophe. The poor child cannot afford to fail, and so often cannot afford to try. I am talking about architecture here, not character. The system is built this way. It has always been built this way.

And some of the most formidable minds in human history have been saying so for a very long time.

Plato argued in The Republic, nearly two and a half millennia ago, that a just society required the abolition of private wealth among its leaders, because the accumulation of property inevitably corrupts governance and divides the polity into warring factions of rich and poor. Thomas More, in Utopia, written in 1516, imagined a society without private property, where goods were held in common and distributed according to need, a direct indictment of the England he lived in, where enclosure laws were stripping peasants of their land to enrich the gentry. Oscar Wilde, in The Soul of Man, argued with characteristic elegance that the existing economic order crushed individuality and that the true purpose of a just society would be to free every person to become, in essence, an artist: not in the narrow sense of the word, but in the sense of a human being fully realized, unburdened by the degrading necessity of competition for survival.

Albert Einstein, a figure whose intellectual legacy has been carefully sanitized of its political dimensions, wrote an essay in 1949 called “Why Socialism?” in which he argued plainly that the economic system under which we all live is the root source of human suffering. He called the competitive drive for profit a “predatory phase” of human development. He said we had not yet evolved beyond it, and that we must.

Carl Sagan, when asked by Ted Turner on live television in 1989 whether he was a socialist, declined the label but not the substance. He argued that the United States was unique among wealthy nations in its refusal to care for its own citizens, that the country had more than enough resources to guarantee every person a dignified life, and that it simply chose not to. He pointed to the military and the ultra-wealthy as the primary recipients of the nation’s abundance while its poorest citizens went without healthcare, without education, without hope.

Helen Keller was a radical organizer who spent her adult life arguing that the economic machine of private accumulation was directly responsible for poverty, for the exploitation of workers, for the denial of education and medicine to the poor. She was an active member of organizations fighting for collective ownership of the means of production. This is not a footnote in her biography, but a defining political commitment of her life, and it has been almost entirely erased from the version of her story we teach children.

Martin Luther King Jr., in the final years of his life, the years that tend to get the least airtime, spoke explicitly about the redistribution of economic power, about the class struggle, about the need to fundamentally restructure a society that generated poverty as a byproduct of its normal functioning.

These were some of the most respected, most cited, most admired human beings who ever lived. And they were all saying the same thing: the system itself is the problem. The concentrations of ownership. The private capture of collectively generated wealth. The competitive structure that forces human beings to fight each other for survival rather than cooperate for mutual flourishing. This is the gap that has been widening for centuries. This is the gap that generates pollution and consumption and mental illness and chronic disease and violence and war. And AI did not create it. AI is simply the latest, and perhaps the most powerful, instrument through which it expresses itself.

So when I say I do not hate AI, I mean it. Completely. What I hate is the system that took the most powerful tool ever created by human beings and immediately, reflexively, inevitably turned it into an instrument of surveillance and job displacement and military application and resource extraction. I hate the system that has always forced artists to starve. That has always treated creative labor as a luxury, an indulgence, something to be tolerated only when it can be monetized and discarded the moment it can be automated. That is not new. The system has always sought ways to force individuals to compete with their art rather than flourish with it. AI has simply leveled the competition in a way that was previously unimaginable.

The system and those who own and control it: they are the ones who trained these models on our art and our labor without our consent. I have learned that my own novels, specifically A Dream of Waking Life and Mendel’s Ladder, appear in the training data for ChatGPT, and likely several other large language models as well. My words, my years of work, my creative output, scraped and ingested and used to build a product that is now being used to replace people like me. No one asked. No one compensated. No one so much as sent a notification.

And I still do not hate AI.

Because hating AI for what it is being used to do is like hating a gun for killing someone. I say this as a person who genuinely hates guns, who would love nothing more than to live in a country with zero firearms, but who also recognizes that this is a fantasy rendered absurd by the very system and system-owners who have allowed three hundred and thirty million people to live alongside an estimated five hundred million guns. I find the situation grotesque, and I also find it utterly predictable, because it was not an accident. It was a market. It was a lobby. It was a set of decisions made by real people with real names who prioritized profit and power over safety and sanity.

Zero times has a pistol stood trial for murder.

There are real people behind these systems of exploitation and violence and war and displacement. Real people with names and addresses and quarterly earnings reports. People who are not combating some inevitable force of nature but making choices: choices to extract, to surveil, to consolidate, to automate human beings out of their livelihoods while pocketing the savings. They are not combating some inevitable force of nature. They are not combating anything at all. They are the architects.

Recently, I experienced something that crystallized all of this for me. A witch hunt was launched against me, accusing me of having written Point of Origin using AI. This is a novel I wrote from 2015 to 2017 and published in 2018. Unless I have access to a time machine, it could not have been written by AI. The technology did not exist in any publicly accessible form during the years I was drafting it. The accusation is, on its face, absurd.

And yet the witch hunt continues.

I am still not angry at AI. There are real people with real names behind these accusations. People who chose to make them, chose to spread them, chose to sustain them. Just as there are real people who chose to scrape my novels into training data. Just as there are real people who chose to build autonomous weapons systems. Just as there are real people who chose to lay off entire creative departments and replace them with subscription software. All things, all events, all systems of consequence are enabled and enacted by people. This is true of everything. Always.

And this is where I need everyone to pay very close attention, because this is the part that the discourse keeps getting catastrophically wrong.

We should not be hunting down small-time artists. We should not be hunting down any artists, even those who do use AI. Think about it for a moment: if their own creative work was scraped and used to train the very models they’re now accused of relying on, do they not have some stake in the output of that tool? Were they not, in effect, unwilling and uncompensated contributors to its construction? The moral calculus here is far more tangled than the witch hunters want to admit.

But truthfully? It doesn’t matter. The question of which individual artists are or aren’t using AI is a distraction. A seductive, satisfying, utterly counterproductive distraction. Because while we are busy policing each other, while writers tear down other writers, while freelancers eat freelancers, while the masses devour themselves in a frenzy of suspicion and self-righteousness, the people who actually built these systems, who actually profit from the displacement, who actually hold the levers of power, sit comfortably above the fray, watching us do their work for them.

This is the oldest trick in the book. It is the trick that has sustained every exploitative arrangement in the history of civilization. Divide the laborers. Pit the workers against each other. Make them fight over scraps while you walk away with the harvest. Make them so busy surviving that they never look up long enough to notice who is actually in charge.

There is only one real enemy. It is the same enemy that has existed since the first grain surplus was hoarded by a priest-king, since the first common land was enclosed by a lord, since the first wage was set not by the value of the labor but by the desperation of the laborer. It is not a technology. It is not an algorithm. It is not a chatbot. It is a system, a very specific, very old, very deliberately maintained system, in which the tools of collective human achievement are privately owned, in which the wealth generated by the many is captured by the few, in which every technological revolution that could liberate us is instead weaponized to further entrench the power of those who already have it.

The printing press could have democratized knowledge. It did, eventually, but not before it was used to consolidate religious and political authority for centuries. The industrial revolution could have freed humanity from backbreaking labor. Instead, it gave us child labor, sixteen-hour workdays, and company towns. The internet could have been the great equalizer, a commons of information and connection. Instead, it became the most sophisticated surveillance and advertising apparatus ever devised. And now AI, perhaps the most transformative technology since fire, is following the same pattern. The technology isn’t evil. The system that controls it is simply designed, from the ground up, to convert liberation into profit.

The answer is not to smash the machine. The answer is to change who owns it, and for whose benefit it operates.

Every one of those great minds I cited earlier (Plato, More, Wilde, Einstein, Sagan, Keller, King) arrived at the same fundamental conclusion, across centuries and continents and disciplines: that the root of human suffering is the private capture of collectively generated wealth, and that the only path toward genuine human flourishing is a society organized around the principle that the fruits of our collective labor, our collective ingenuity, our collective creativity, belong to all of us. Not as charity. Not as a safety net. As a foundational organizing principle. As the bedrock of civilization itself.

That is not a radical idea. It is the most ancient and obvious idea in the world. It is radical only within a system that has spent centuries conditioning us to believe that competition is nature, that hierarchy is inevitable, that the suffering of the many is an acceptable price for the comfort of the few.

AI has not changed the game. It has revealed the game. It has made the architecture visible in a way that is harder and harder to ignore. And the question before us now is not whether we love or hate the tool, but whether we have the courage to look past it and name the thing it is pointing at.

The real enemy has a face. It has always had a face. Many faces, in fact, on magazine covers and in boardrooms and in houses of law. They are not combating fate, and they are not combating nature. They are making choices. They are choosing who eats and who starves, who works and who is discarded, who creates and who is consumed.

Direct your ire accordingly. That is all I ask. Because focusing it on anyone else, on the tool, on each other, on the artist down the street trying to survive, is exactly what they want you to do. It always has been their goal.