AI, Labor & Culture
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Not Yet
'Not yet' is not a reassurance. It's a diagnosis. Anthropic's own research shows a 14% drop in job-finding rates for young workers in AI-exposed fields. The data says the displacement hasn't hit yet. The structure says it's already underway. I grew up inside that gap in Gelsenkirchen — I know what it looks like when 'not yet' becomes 'too late.'
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The Corporate Benevolence Fantasy
The promise that AI will make everything cheaper rests on one assumption — that corporations will pass their savings to consumers. The forty-year productivity-pay gap says they won't. The 2017 tax cut dress rehearsal says they won't. And $1.6 trillion in shareholder buybacks in a single year confirms they aren't.
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I've Seen This Before
I grew up in Gelsenkirchen, in the Ruhr Valley, and watched coal and steel collapse over decades. Retraining never worked at scale. The trades offer a reprieve, not an escape. And the science fiction writers have been ahead of the economists for seventy years — a structural problem requires a structural response.
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Who Buys What We Build?
U.S. employers cut 1.2 million jobs in 2025 while posting record profits and pouring tens of billions into AI. AI didn't break capitalism. It exposed a version of capitalism that had already stopped distributing its gains.