Why We Fear AI

On the Interpretation of Nightmares

Authors
Hagen Blix
Ingeborg Glimmer
Publisher
Common Notions
Year
2025
Collection
Work
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Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer make a compelling case for why we fear AI: our fears of what AI will do to us are really just our fears of what capitalism is already doing. In this way, AI isn’t so much a novel new technology as an acceleration of long-existing patterns in neoliberal capitalism—automation, deskilling, unaccountability, surveillance, and increasing precarity amidst shrinking welfare systems. But therein also lies a clue as to how to counter it, in that only organized, democratic control of labor can stand up to capital. When we see through the hype, we know what work we have to do.

Reading notes

Promises and perils

One of the just-so stories we keep hearing about AI is that it’s inevitable, that the technology is here and will continue to be here, and we better get on board or get left behind. These stories have the ring of a threat because they are, explicitly and otherwise, threatening. They are also familiar.

Fear that there may be no alternative to the will of the AI arise because we have been told for decades that there is no alternative to neoliberalism, that there is no alternative to the mediation of all society by profit-driven markets, no alternative to the universal power of private self-interest that continually tries not to better the world, but to maximize it’s own profit and hence power. Stories about the “promises and perils” of AI ring true, not because the AI is poised to hunt all of us down, but because the stories reflect real experiences of technology, capitalism, and ideology; they reflect the capitalist developments of the incomprehensibility of technology, the invisibilization of labor, enclosures, proliferating neoliberal bureaucracies, and the sense that there is no alternative to capitalism and the status quo.

Blix & Glimmer, Why We Fear AI, page 56

In other words, the threat isn’t so much that AI is inevitable as that the ongoing—and likely expanding—immiseration of workers is unstoppable. This is the subtext of the strange and conflicted messaging that we get from the hype men: when they say that you better learn AI or be left behind, they are admitting that a great many people will be left behind. And if you—smart and clever and hardworking person that you are—are somehow able to make it to the other side of the line, you’re supposed to find relief or pride at having done so, and not horror at all the people suffering in your wake. You’re supposed to be as uncaring as the capital that uses you.

But getting through this gauntlet is no guarantee of getting through the next one—and there will be a next one, because the plain aim of the technocrats is to immiserate everyone, eventually. From the capitalist perspective, anyone with skills enough to negotiate a comfortable wage is a cost in need of cutting. Add to that the fact that AI’s whole pitch is that the more you use it, the more data it gathers, the more likely it becomes capable of mimicking you well enough to convince the fools above you that it can do your job. So get-in-or-get-left-behind is something of a trick—everyone is left behind, eventually.

Which is both terrifying and clarifying. Terrifying in that the capitalists really do have the ability to do us harm—they have been doing so, already. Clarifying in that there really isn’t any reason to stay on the path they’ve laid out for us. It leads nowhere good. Meanwhile, there aren’t very many people up ahead, and there are a whole lot of us back here. Let’s see what we can do.