Pluralistic: Which jobs can be replaced with AI? (06 Aug 2025)
Today's links Which jobs can be replaced with AI?: Jobs that have already be degraded to the point of uselessness. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Circular batteries; Prison for file-sharing, Satanic abortions. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Which jobs can be replaced with AI? (permalink) I don't think AI can do your job (but I do think an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job). However, there is a class of workers whose jobs can be performed perfectly by AI: workers with bullshit jobs: https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/20/david-graebers-bullshit-jobs-why-does-the-economy-sustain-jobs-that-no-one-values/ David Graeber (RIP) identified several kinds of bullshit jobs and not all of those can be perfectly performed by an AI (for example, the flunkies that minor corporate princelings surround themselves with to demonstrate their status need to be human). But there are whole categories of job that perform functions that corporations don't want performed, like customer service rep, jobs they've spent decades degrading to the point where the people who do them have been stripped of all power and authority and serve no function except allowing a company to claim that they have a customer service department. Replacing these workers with an AI not only saves money by removing their wage-bill from the corporate overhead, but it can actually turn the former cost center into a profit center. That's what Air Canada discovered when they replaced their customer service workers with chatbots. These chatbots gave bad advice to fliers that cost them money, and in every instance except one (where the aggrieved flier was so tenacious that he chased 8 weeks' worth of internal appeals at Air Canada before escalating the matter to a regulator), Air Canada got to keep the money: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2024/02/19/what-air-canada-lost-in-remarkable-lying-ai-chatbot-case/ All of this raises an obvious question: how can Air Canada (and other companies) get away with having customer service reps who are so useless that they can be swapped for defective chatbots? The answer lies in enshittification. While most people who encounter the idea of enshittification glom onto the symptoms it describes, of a three-stage process by which platforms shuttle value from users to business customers to themselves, the crux of enshittification is why this decay takes place. The answer is power: firms that enshittify must first overpower the forces that keep their enshittificatory impulses in check, like competition and regulation (these are two sides of the same coin: getting rid of competition paves the way for regulatory capture). Over decades, Air Canada has merged with the majority of its competitors and has become so structurally important to Canada β a big, geographically dispersed country with many fly-in settlements β that regulators can't really threaten it with meaningful penalties, not without threatening Canada itself. They're too big to fail, thus too big too jail, thus too big to care. That's how Air Canada was able to turn its customer service department into such a joke that it just didn't matter anymore, and so it didn't matter if it replaced those purely ornamental customer service reps with chatbots. The rise and rise of overseas call-center outsourcing paved the way for AI replacement in the same way that Walmart paved the way for Amazon. Once Walmart destroyed your town center and vaporized all the businesses that served your community, why wouldn't you shop on Amazon? Likewise: once companies replaced their customer service department with immiserated overseas call-center workers who were required to recite rote responses from a three-ring binder and were given no agency or capacity to solve your problem, why not replace them with AIs? Monopolistic firms are full of people who they don't value because they do jobs the company doesn't value (e.g. moderators on large social media services). This week, I'm at Skyboat Media studios, recording the audiobook for the Enshittification book, and so I got to talking with Gabrielle De Cuir and Stefan Rudnicki, the owners. They talked about the threat they're facing from AI audiobook "narrators," who replace directors, actors and editors with a single piece of software. There's a whole class of audiobooks where AI can be a perfect substitute β thanks to Audible, and its enshittification. Audible has waged war on unionized voice actors, replacing them with desperate newbies who will tolerate terrible working conditions, including a practice called "punch and roll" that makes actors responsible for doing their own editing when they misspeak, rather than re-recording a passage for an editor to fix later ("pickups"). There are plenty of Audible books that are recorded without a director or an editor or a proofer, meaning that inexperienced actor's mistakes and mispronunciations survive into the final product. These books, produced by the monopolist audiobook platform, with a 90%+ market share for popular fiction, are already degraded to the point of being not fit for purpose. Replacing the actors with AI barely makes a difference. AI text-to-speech is a giant improvement on existing TTS tools, and there are plenty of people who stand to benefit from this, for example, people with visual impairments. But there's no business model in selling readaloud bots to blind people β certainly not a model that recoups the hundreds of billions that has been sprayed around for AI training and operation. The AI business model relies on obliterating the wage bill of workers and replacing it with a cheaper software license. Unfortunately (for the fortunes of AI investors) the majority of workers whose wages can be readily swapped for a software license are the lowest-paid, most precarious ones, people whose jobs have already been degraded and enshittified to the point where no one will notice the difference if they are replaced with a chatbot. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; KBetik; CC BY-SA 3.0; modified) Hey look at this (permalink) If you oppose the State of Israel, this post is not for you https://coreyrobin.com/2025/08/04/if-you-oppose-the-state-of-israel-this-post-is-not-for-you/ Vote for the 2025 Tiny Awards Winner https://tinyawards.net/vote/ In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Canβt Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen https://www.colincornaby.me/2025/08/in-the-future-all-food-will-be-cooked-in-a-microwave-and-if-you-cant-deal-with-that-then-you-need-to-get-out-of-the-kitchen/ Debt's Grip Now Available! https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2025/08/debts-grip-now-available.html No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive https://colton.dev/blog/curing-your-ai-10x-engineer-imposter-syndrome/ Object permanence (permalink) #10yrsago Why privacy activists and economists should be on the same side https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2640607 #10yrsago Universal Musicβs anti-piracy ads reached new heights of crazypants gore https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/06/universal-musics-anti-piracy-ads-even-crazier-than-you-can-imagine/ #10yrsago UK govt wants your opinion on sending file-sharers to jail for 10 years https://web.archive.org/web/20150905144030/https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/copyright-enforcement-consultation #10yrsago Robert Charles Wilsonβs The Affinities: when science changes everything https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/06/robert-charles-wilsons-the-affinities-when-science-changes-everything/ #5yrsago California DMV's $50m/year data selloff https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/07/tired-of-winning/#you-are-the-product #5yrsago Novartis's $678m bribery scandal https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/07/tired-of-winning/#novartis #5yrsago US plummets below Russia and Mexico in global misery index https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/07/tired-of-winning/#usa-usa-usa #5yrsago Satanic Abortions cut through unconstitutional abortion laws https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/07/tired-of-winning/#thyself-is-thy-master #5yrsago Restore the Office of Technology Assessment https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/07/tired-of-winning/#ota #1yrago Circular battery self-sufficiency https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility Upcoming appearances (permalink) Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12 https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/ DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) Tariffs vs IP Law (Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFABFe-5-uQ ORG at 20: In conversation with Maria Farrell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9H2An_D6io Why aren't we controlling our own tech? (Co-Op Congress) https://www.youtube.com/live/GLrDwHgeCy4?si=NUWxPphk0FS_3g9J&t=4409 Latest books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) Canny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1007 words yesterday, 22630 words total). A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work β excluding any serialized fiction β is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. 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