Sign up to see the future, today<\/p>\n
Can\u2019t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 2026. AI is everywhere, and frankly, humans have had it too good for far too long. For the world\u2019s corporations \u2014 the movers and shakers of the global economy, as it\u2019s currently organized \u2014 it\u2019s well past time to leave us flesh bags behind.<\/p>\n
That, at least, seems to be the contention of Daniel Miessler, an outspoken cybersecurity engineer and AI booster. In a rambling post on his personal blog<\/a>, Miessler takes the position that human workers are already obsolete, so the best thing we can do is accept it and fall in line with the AI revolution.<\/p>\n \u201cMy favorite way of capturing this: the ideal number of human employees inside of any company is zero,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThat is the number that they\u2019re trying to get to.\u201d<\/p>\n He\u2019s not just using hyperbole, he takes pains to clarify.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I say zero, I mean zero workers,\u201d the AI wonk told Fortune in a followup interview<\/a>. \u201cAs in factory [or] machine jobs. Like regular working people.\u201d<\/p>\n Miessler\u2019s central claim, it seems, is that we\u2019ve basically been living through one long industrial revolution, albeit one that\u2019s stalled out over the past century or so. In his view, AI is \u201cjust the thing that allows us to continue what the Industrial Revolution started,\u201d which will enable the titans of capital to reach the \u201cnatural, clean, happy state for any company\u201d: no human workers whatsoever.<\/p>\n We can\u2019t help but notice that Miessler ignores the question of who will own and control the infrastructure and foundational models driving the AI boom. His essay seems to basically describe a technological yet feudal dystopia, where we\u2019re all tenants to AI systems, which are in turn loyal subjects to a handful of tech overlords.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is my belief that companies would rather be doing all the work themselves if they could, as opposed to paying humans to do it,\u201d he told Fortune. \u201cJust the same way that they would rather have machines in a factory than have a bunch of humans doing those machine jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n Though his prescription is certifiable, his diagnosis of technology\u2019s role in a capitalist system is spot on. <\/p>\n As French labor sociologist Juan Sebastian Carbonell put it in a 2022 interview with Jacobin<\/a>, the \u201cproblem with the transformation of work today is less that new technologies could eventually replace workers, but that they are used to degrade working conditions, keep wages stagnant, and mount a major flexibilization of working time.\u201d<\/p>\n The real struggle, Carbonell argues, isn\u2019t over obsolescence \u2014 it\u2019s a \u201cbattle over whose interests the new technologies will serve.\u201d<\/p>\n