I watched an interview with Tristan Harris recently and it’s been sitting with me.
A lot of it wasn’t exactly new, but hearing it laid out plainly made something feel more concrete. The speed at which AI is replacing cognitive labor seems faster than most people are prepared for, especially compared to how slowly our social and political systems adapt.
One framing that stuck with me was the idea of AI as a flood of “digital immigrants”—not in a cultural sense, but in an economic one. Systems that can do high-level cognitive work, at scale, at superhuman speed, without labor rights or bargaining power. Whether that metaphor is perfect or not, the underlying point feels hard to ignore: many institutions are quietly discovering they no longer need people in the way they used to.
This isn’t just about jobs disappearing. It’s about what happens when participation itself becomes optional from the perspective of companies and states.
We’ve already seen versions of this before. Globalization promised abundance through cheaper goods and more efficient production. In practice, that abundance was unevenly distributed, while local economic structures hollowed out. People were told this was “progress,” even as housing became unaffordable and upward mobility stalled or even reversed.
Current AI feels like a continuation of that pattern, but applied to cognitive work instead of manufacturing. The promise is abundance again—cheaper services, faster output, more “efficiency.” The cost seems to be the erosion of meaningful participation: fewer entry points, fewer junior roles, fewer ways to learn by doing.
I keep thinking about what happens when thinking itself becomes something you rent. When judgment, synthesis, and memory are increasingly outsourced to systems optimized for speed and scale. Even if these tools are useful in many areas there’s a risk that over time we stop exercising the muscles they replace.
None of this feels like a single problem with a single solution. Universal Basic Income comes up often, but even that feels incomplete if what’s being lost isn’t just income, but agency, learning, and social role. Work has been a flawed proxy for participation, but removing it without replacing the underlying structure leaves a vacuum.
What I find myself circling back to is ‘participation’ versus ‘usefulness.’ If people are no longer economically “useful” in the traditional sense, what does participation look like? Who decides what counts? And how do we avoid drifting into a world where most people are technically provided for but structurally irrelevant?