@wsj.com documents the gradual shift away from peak hype on the AI jobs apocalypse. Just. Not. Happening.

Much of AI "productivity gains" come from managers implicitly trusting an LLM to do a good job, and suspending the onerous micromanagement that humans employees get subjected to. You can do that without paying Anthropic a single penny. It just requires letting the experts you hired do their jobs.

Trust is not built on craft alone

No amount of tooling will let product teams move faster than being trusted to own their process. That trust is earned through rigor rather than mere velocity.

productpicnic.beehiiv.com

As usual, Henry gets it.

So the world’s only trillionaire, who hates taxes, opposes wealth redistribution, wants to cut public spending, and barely gives to charity, wants you to think he will lead the world to abundance for all if you buy his robots? How has that worked so far?

Are there any artists who are mapmakers on here? Is that a real thing? I’m guessing it would mostly be for tabletop campaigns but I have a project that needs a sick looking map and I’m looking to commission one this summer.

On the one-year anniversary of EMPIRE OF AI, I am so, so excited to announce The AI Resist List, a new project that documents examples of resistance to the AI empires around the world 😍 airesistlist.org

This is how you speak about AI to young people, or to anyone really.

How significant is support in the European Parliament for efforts to undermine the Digital Services Act, and how does that support align with criticism from the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress? Tech Policy Press contributing editor Dean Jackson collected public evidence.

Charting the Transatlantic Far Right Campaign Against Europe’s Digital Rules

How large is the European interest in Washington’s narrative of censorship and grievance? Dean Jackson considers evidence on the public record.

buff.ly

Apparently, collaborating with AI impairs unassisted performance because it optimises on short-term goals not long-term. The frame is the trick; you can't actually 'collaborate' with a synthetic token machine at all. Myth-making masquerading as critique ⚠️ arxiv.org/abs/2604.04721

AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance

People often optimize for long-term goals in collaboration: A mentor or companion doesn't just answer questions, but also scaffolds learning, tracks progress, and prioritizes the other person's growth...

arxiv.org

Large language mistake Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it. www.theverge.com/ai-artificia... great read from @benjaminjriley.bsky.social

Anyway, this is why they all act like they do - they quite literally don't believe other people exist in any way that matters; THEY exist, but only as pure Intelligence, which is all that will be left once the great programmer in the sky destroys material reality

disesdi.substack.com/p/if-you-bou...

Everybody is (understandably) very excited that Anthropic isn't selling their AI for Hegseth to use to automate his war crimes. But I would gently suggest that we not accept setting the bar quite so low. www.anildash.com/2026/02/27/a...

A Cookie for Dario? — Anthropic and selling death - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

anildash.com

"Women adopt AI at rates 25% lower than men. This isn’t a guess. It’s the finding of a Harvard Business School meta-analysis examining eighteen studies, over 140,000 participants, across multiple countries." "Every AI Company Is Building a Different Wife" abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-built...

Anna Kornbluh@annakornbluh.bsky.social · 7mo ago

one of many reasons that the organized critique and refusal movement is overwhelmingly led by women (yes including women computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and engineers)

I'm gonna repeat my comment. Talking about nonexistent "super intelligent" machines is like talking about the Cookie Monster rather than corporations creating real things causing harm. A non existent machine god bringing apocalypse or utopia is a framing that is harmful. Period.

Another day, another PM influencer boasting how much more productive they became with AI by…. doing dev stuff…. 🙈

I couldn't help but track it down, and that article is underselling what the AI report said, too. www.parkrecord.com/2025/12/16/h...

Users hate AI. So tech made it mandatory. Even if you don't use it, it pollutes what you read and how systems make decisions. The computer's hallucinated word is final. And it needs all of your data to do it. In the age of no consent, UX exists to normalized complete acquiescence to surveillance:

The AI age is the "age of no consent"

"Inevitability" means design decisions are no longer informed by user needs; now they are unilaterally imposed. The users are the ones being designed.

productpicnic.beehiiv.com

www.pangram.com

It's your birthday, Duane.

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future." - @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit. Incredible words. Listen to all of it!

“When participants used ChatGPT to draft essays, brain scans revealed a 47% drop in neural connectivity across regions associated with memory, language, & critical reasoning. Their brains worked less, but they felt just as engaged—a kind of metacognitive mirage.”🧪

David Hull 胡大衛@hushuo.bsky.social · 8mo ago

I finally got around to reading this. You should read it too. "We are exporting the very labor of teaching and learning—the slow work of wrestling with ideas, the enduring of discomfort, doubt and confusion, the struggle of finding one’s own voice." www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

OTD in 2002, Ivan Illich died. A radical social critic and philosopher, Illich offered one of the most distinctive and influential critiques of modern technology in the 20th century. 1/

Headline: "AI can replace 11.7% of workforce" Actual study: Anthropic paid MIT to use a "labor simulation tool" that said 11.7% of TASKS could be done by AI

MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce

Artificial intelligence can already replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market, across finance, health care and professional services, according to MIT's study.

cnbc.com

“Constant lying is not about making people believe a lie, but about ensuring that no one believes anything. A people who no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between good and evil: a people deprived of the power to think,” Hannah Arendt. Are we there yet?

It's my favorite day! It's the 38th anniversary of the Max Headroom signal broadcast intrusion! 1st incident lasted 25s during the 9PM news on WGN-TV in Chicago; The 2nd, 2hrs later, lasted ~90s on PBS affiliate WTTW during Dr. Who. You can watch it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqge...

Max Headroom 1987 Broadcast Signal Intrusion Incident

YouTube video by andrew867

youtube.com

Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other. Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq

So these two trends—AI as smokescreen for management's ulterior motives/misplaced belief in its hype, and AI as an automation system for producing cheap knockoff art and writing (at the expense of artists and writers)—are what I think are the biggest impacts of AI on jobs so far. More in the piece:

What’s really going on with AI and jobs?

Record-breaking layoff reports, Amazon's mass firings, and a slump in entry level employment. Is AI behind it all?

bloodinthemachine.com