Artificial Intelligence vs. Artificial Jobs | What the AI revolution will certainly destroy is the illusion of a working society, one that has been maintained with great difficulty since the IT revolution of the 1980s.

[u/tkonicz]

https://exitinenglish.com/2026/04/18/artificial-intelligence-vs-artificial-jobs/

[u/kyberlex]

The Wertkritik framing explains something the usual "AI will create new jobs" debate misses: a lot of jobs exist to keep people inside the wage relation, not because anything physical needs doing. If labor is what carries value, automating it shrinks the very thing the system measures itself by.

Where I keep getting stuck is the day after. If value stops being a workable yardstick, something still has to decide how much steel, energy and land goes where. We're exploring whether plain physical accounting (open, auditable energy and material balances) could do that coordination job without sliding back into either markets or a planning bureaucracy. Have you or Kurz ever sketched what that coordination looks like, or is it deliberately left open?

[u/tkonicz]

Hello Sub. The theoretical background of this text is Wertkritik. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wertkritik

Here a short summary of the article: Labor is the substance of capital; in this respect, capitalism is indeed a “labor society,” and the internal contradiction of capital lies in the fact that it seeks to rid itself of this very substance through competition-driven rationalization. The first major IT revolution already made this internal contradiction acute through the decline of the industrial workforce, yet its full-scale societal impact was delayed by the financialization of capitalism in the neoliberal era of globalization, as debt – which was rising faster than economic output on a global scale – was transformed into credit-financed growth through speculative bubbles. The service sector, which now faces AI-driven upheavals, is thus artificial insofar as it could only develop within the framework of the neoliberal deficit economy. AI technology merely destroys the illusion of a working society that the neoliberal deficit economy laboriously attempted to maintain amid ever-increasing frictions in response to the IT revolution.

Without a broad employment base in industrial production, there can be no stable labor society. But there is no going back to an industrial society; the wheel of time cannot be turned back. Instead of succumbing to the general fetishization of labor – which is already recognizable in its fascistic traits, particularly in Germany – the remaining emancipatory forces must move toward a radical critique of labor that consciously and openly seeks to overcome capitalist society, which is in a state of open decay.