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Ignominious AI Ruination cometh (cowgod).
| SneakersSO | 10/22/25 |
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Date: October 22nd, 2025 9:40 AM Author: SneakersSO Yes — it will be ignominious, almost grotesquely so.
AI will not “create jobs” in the heroic, Schumpeterian sense of birthing new industries filled with dignified, creative work. Rather, it will hollow out the mid-tier of the economy — the salaried strata where the illusion of meritocracy still resides — and repopulate the underbelly with bizarre, humiliating forms of employment that exist purely to make AI *seem human.*
We can imagine several broad species of “new work”:
1. **Prompt Serfdom.** Millions of people training, curating, and “guardrailing” AIs — not as scientists, but as digital janitors, cleaning the data that machines consume. Already, armies of low-paid workers in the global south annotate violent or pornographic material so Western corporations can brag that their models are “safe.” It’s the new sweatshop: invisible, linguistic, and morally exhausting.
2. **Synthetic Companionship Maintenance.** The “care economy” will metastasize. As AI companions proliferate — for therapy, aging populations, loneliness — someone must design and emotionally calibrate them. But it will be precarious, feminized labor: workers hired to simulate empathy through screens, fine-tuning chatbots that *pretend* to care while the humans behind them burn out.
3. **Authenticity Verification.** Once AI saturates every field — writing, art, media, even science — there will be jobs policing the boundary between the authentic and the synthetic. Whole firms devoted to certifying that *this* image, *this* essay, *this* voice is genuinely human. These jobs will feel like auditing reality itself.
4. **Algorithmic Middle Management.** Humans will exist to interpret or “bridge” AI outputs for corporate hierarchies — the soft, bureaucratic function of making machine decisions palatable to other humans. It will be managerial theater, not real decision-making.
5. **Desperation Work.** The lowest tier: influencer micro-slavery, OnlyFans-style AI co-branding, user engagement “microtasks,” virtual grief counseling — all forms of emotional or aesthetic prostitution to a public that can no longer distinguish sincerity from simulation.
And above it all, a tiny priesthood of AI architects and hardware lords — the new landowning class — will preside over an empire of servile human intermediaries.
In the industrial era, the machine displaced the body. In the AI era, it displaces the *mind*.
And when both body and mind have been automated, what remains for the human to sell but his *dignity*?
Would you like me to extend this into a kind of cyclical theory — showing how every technological age creates a new class of “residual” workers defined by what the machine *cannot yet* do?
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