Everything we hear about artificial intelligence is conflicting, and hearing about it feels inescapable. AI is terrible. AI is wonderful. It will break the world. It will transform the future. It\u2019s essential to embrace it. It\u2019s a moral imperative to abstain from using it.<\/p>\n
The Guardian\u2019s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link.\u00a0Learn more<\/a>.<\/p>\n Already, AI is projected to generate nearly unfathomable amounts of revenue. In the last quarter of 2025, it represented nearly 60% of the growth<\/a> in the US economy. Already, pundits and economists wring their hands about what calamity will befall us<\/a> if and when the AI bubble bursts.<\/p>\n Since ChatGPT, the first of the large language models, was released in late 2022, more than half a million workers in the tech industry alone have lost their jobs<\/a>. Any mention of AI tends to be accompanied by warnings that deeper jobs cuts across many more industries are coming for us all. Jensen Huang, CEO of chip giant Nvidia, said in 2025<\/a>: \u201cEvery job will be affected, and immediately. It is unquestionable. You\u2019re not going to lose your job to an AI, but you\u2019re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI.\u201d In January, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted<\/a>: \u201cAI isn\u2019t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.\u201d<\/p>\n Increasingly, people young and old flock to a new gold rush in Silicon Valley to toil away on AI-fueled startups<\/a>. Many of them are driven less by idealistic enthusiasm and more by the dread of missing a ticket for the last train to wealth \u2013 and getting stuck forever in the \u201cpermanent underclass<\/a>\u201d that, with any luck, they themselves will create.<\/p>\n What all these divergently apocalyptic ideas hold in common is their AI absolutism \u2013 a way of seeing AI as a godlike force that will either hasten a golden age of productivity and innovation, or will doom humanity. It mirrors the political polarization of our era and even the zealotry found in religious fanaticism<\/a>. This is by design. Contradictory as they may be, all these arguments and anxieties fit neatly into the overarching message of the people building this technology: AI\u2019s dominance is inevitable. Get on board or you will be left behind. The robber barons of our age stand to profit wildly from not only enthusiasm about their star product, but also, the terror of it.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you want to justify this enormous valuation in your IPO, you need to point to the revenue stream that you\u2019re going to generate in the future,\u201d said Suresh Naidu, a professor at Columbia University\u2019s department of economics. \u201cYou just need to make it look like you have something that can eat all the work on the planet, so that an investor will think: \u2018Oh wow, I don\u2019t want to miss out on this thing.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Naidu isn\u2019t refuting claims that AI will cut into jobs or upend certain industries. He called the technology \u201ctransformative\u201d and said that he uses it every day in his work as a researcher and academic. It\u2019s just that when he zooms out and puts AI and all its attendant promises and warnings in historical context, he sees a lot of hype.<\/p>\n There is no control group<\/p>\n Anil Dash, the former CEO of the startup Glitch, who\u2019s been writing about tech for decades, is also unconvinced that the AI we\u2019re being sold will do all the things tech CEOs are predicting it will do.<\/p>\n \u201cAny technology that you invest like a trillion dollars into is going to be able to do a lot of things, good or bad. [AI is] a leap forward. I don\u2019t think we\u2019ve ever had a machine learning system that can do as many things as this one does,\u201d he said. But \u201cthere\u2019s so much noise that it\u2019s hard to tell what the domains of applicability are.\u201d Coding is an exception, he said. It\u2019s easier to test an AI model\u2019s coding output because it will clearly work, or it won\u2019t. Many other applications for the tech are much more subjective and therefore less prone to immediate job replacement.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why the tech industry has made the deepest job cuts so far \u2013 though, amid layoffs at companies such as Amazon, Meta and Block, reports from employees<\/a> have emerged saying the AI productivity gains their bosses trumpet are overblown<\/a>.<\/p>\n Even the role AI is playing in those layoffs and reductions to entry-level positions isn\u2019t entirely clear. Martin Beraja, a professor at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business who studies technological innovation and business cycles, said recent studies that have drawn connections between the release of ChatGPT<\/a> and a decline in entry-level software jobs are \u201cproblematic\u201d.<\/p>\n There was \u201ca buildup of jobs in [tech] coming out of the pandemic, and once \u2026 consumption patterns moved away from online to the real world again, now we had too many people working in the industry that we didn\u2019t really need\u201d, Beraja said.<\/p>\n Some of the biggest and most loudly pro-AI players in tech have arrived at similar conclusions as AI critics. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen proclaimed in March that overstaffed companies are using AI as a \u201csilver-bullet excuse\u201d<\/a> to clean house. In May, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman retreated on some of his prior claims<\/a> of massive job replacement by AI, saying: \u201cI thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than \u200bhas actually happened.\u201d<\/p>\n And if AI\u2019s worst-case scenario for tech jobs plays out \u2013 which would indeed be very bad for many people \u2013 that\u2019s still nowhere near the apocalyptic future of labor that many fear. \u201cIs it, in fact, going to destroy all of the jobs?\u201d Naidu asked. \u201cI\u2019m not convinced. Even take software. Software is only about 4 to 6% of GDP. So it\u2019s a lot, but it\u2019s not like the whole economy can be replaced by Claude Code.\u201d<\/p>\n Convincing people that AI will replace human workers in droves is a clever marketing tactic. Not only does it stoke rabid investor speculation, but it distracts from a more realistic application of AI for the global workforce, stretching far beyond the borders of the tech industry: using AI to surveil and micromanage<\/a> employees to squeeze yet more productivity out of them, all the while pressuring them to feel grateful that they have any kind of work at all. Gig workers, the people who pick you up in Ubers and deliver your food on platforms like DoorDash, have already been the guinea pigs for this kind of algorithmic management, and labor experts predict it will spread.<\/p>\n It can feel like we\u2019re living in an experiment when it comes to the rise of AI. Naidu would like us to update that framing. \u201cAn experiment implies a control group of something that\u2019s not affected. There\u2019s no control group here,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Remember there are alternatives<\/p>\n The version of AI that we\u2019re being sold doesn\u2019t have to be the version we buy. Nor does it need to be the story we believe in.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t an argument for an abstinence-only relationship with AI, something that has too much in common with evangelical Christianity\u2019s unrealistic stance on premarital sex. Anyone with common sense can see how those kinds of ascetic codes play out in reality. It\u2019s happening already with AI. \u201cAI is just another technology Americans don\u2019t like but can\u2019t stop using,\u201d the Washington Post\u2019s Shira Ovide wrote earlier this year<\/a>, referring to the polarized divide between polling that shows how much they distrust the tech and numbers of rapid user growth<\/a> in the past year.<\/p>\n Instead, this is an argument for moderation. Beraja, the UC Berkeley professor, said there\u2019s too much focus on AI as a job replacement technology. Outside a few industries like tech, he said studies show that the most effective ways for people and companies to use AI is not to replace workers, but to learn more, and learn faster<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWhere I think we have to get to is, there can be alternatives,\u201d said Dash. \u201cWhat we can imagine is, rather than the ChatGPT killer, a lot of different little AIs from little responsible players.\u201d A few are already quietly cropping up<\/a>, harkening back to earlier and more optimistic days in the internet\u2019s history, and offering a glimpse of what could be possible if people took AI into their own hands.<\/p>\n And for the industries and jobs that AI is upending, upheaval may open the way for a resurgence<\/a> in worker power as white-collar workers begin to see the appeal of solidarity, whether with colleagues in their office or workers in the blue-collar world.<\/p>\n