AI is being sold as fate
Public arguments about artificial intelligence increasingly arrive in two incompatible forms that somehow reinforce each other. AI is framed as a miracle that will unlock productivity and abundance, or as a force that will sweep away jobs, institutions, and social stability. The cultural effect is the same in both cases: AI is treated less as a set of tools and political choices than as a destiny that everyone else must accommodate.
The source describes this mindset as “AI absolutism.” It is the habit of speaking about AI as if it were a godlike force that will either hasten a golden age or trigger collapse. That framing matters because it narrows the space for ordinary democratic questions. If the future is already prewritten by the technology, then debate over labor policy, market structure, education, ownership, and social protections starts to look secondary or even futile.
That is one reason the current discourse feels so exhausting. People are not just being asked to understand a fast-moving technology. They are being asked to emotionally submit to contradictory certainties. Use AI or be left behind. Resist AI or lose something human. Fear the bubble. Fear missing the boom. The individual claims differ, but they all encourage the same posture: inevitability.
The numbers feed the story
The source text anchors that absolutist mood in real economic scale. It says AI represented nearly 60% of U.S. economic growth in the last quarter of 2025. It also says more than half a million workers in the tech industry alone have lost their jobs since ChatGPT was released in late 2022. Those figures help explain why AI has become such a dominant cultural object. It is not just another consumer technology wave. It is being linked, simultaneously, to macroeconomic growth and to visible labor displacement.
That combination is powerful because it lets very different actors project their own priorities onto AI. Investors see revenue and national competitiveness. Executives see margin pressure and organizational leverage. Workers see both opportunity and threat. Students and founders see the possibility of wealth but also the fear of being shut out from the next platform shift.
The source captures that anxiety directly, describing a new Silicon Valley gold rush populated not only by idealists but by people worried about missing a ticket to wealth and being stranded in a “permanent underclass.” That phrase is severe, but it clarifies the emotional climate surrounding AI adoption. Participation is often framed not as a creative choice but as self-preservation.
The job-loss narrative is doing double work
Statements from industry leaders strengthen the sense of inevitability. The source cites Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang saying every job will be affected immediately and that workers will lose jobs not to AI itself but to someone who uses AI. It also cites Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei describing AI as a general labor substitute for humans rather than a substitute for specific jobs.
These claims do more than forecast disruption. They also market adaptation as compulsory. If AI is a general labor substitute, then employers, workers, schools, and governments are expected to reorganize around that assumption. The prediction becomes a mechanism of behavioral pressure. Companies invest because they believe others will. Workers adopt tools because they fear replacement by peers who do. Founders build because they assume attention and capital are flowing in one direction.
The source argues that convincing people AI will replace workers at massive scale can itself function as a marketing tactic. That is a useful cultural insight. Predictions do not merely describe futures; they help produce them by changing what people believe they must do now.
Absolutism compresses politics into branding
Once AI is cast as destiny, debates over governance start to flatten. Questions about who owns the systems, who benefits from the productivity gains, how displaced workers are protected, and what kinds of uses should be constrained become easier to sidestep. The conversation shifts from political design to attitudinal sorting. Are you pro-AI or anti-AI? Optimist or pessimist? Builder or blocker?
That binary is culturally convenient and intellectually weak. It treats every use of AI as part of the same civilizational referendum. In reality, different systems, markets, and institutions create different problems. A coding assistant, a hiring filter, a medical support model, and a propaganda engine do not raise identical questions. But absolutist rhetoric encourages people to respond to all of them through the same oversized lens.
The result is emotional overload paired with analytical slippage. AI becomes everywhere, but the specifics get thinner. Grand futures crowd out concrete accountability.
Why culture matters here
Technology debates are never only about the tools themselves. They are also about the stories societies tell about power, progress, and control. AI has become culturally dominant in part because it offers a totalizing story: abundance or ruin, speed or obsolescence, genius at scale or permanent exclusion. Those stories are compelling because they reduce uncertainty into drama.
But drama is not the same as clarity. A society can decide how AI is deployed, who bears the risks, and who captures the gains. Those are political questions, not metaphysical ones. The absolutist frame obscures that by making AI sound like weather. You can prepare for it, position around it, or suffer through it, but not govern it. That is an attractive worldview for anyone who benefits when public choices are treated as natural outcomes.
A better frame is still available
The source’s core argument is not that AI is unimportant. It is that both the utopian and apocalyptic versions of the story overstate inevitability and understate agency. That distinction matters. AI can be economically powerful, culturally disruptive, and politically consequential without being treated as an autonomous force outside human control.
Rejecting absolutism does not require denying that jobs may change or that companies are racing to monetize the technology. It requires refusing the shortcut that turns every change into proof that nothing else can be decided. Regulation, labor bargaining, education strategy, public investment, competition policy, and institutional design still matter. They matter precisely because AI is not destiny. It is a field of decisions being made by firms, governments, and users under intense pressure.
The cultural challenge, then, is not to choose between worship and dread. It is to recover proportion. AI may be transformative, but transformation is not a substitute for politics. The future is still being negotiated, even when the marketing says it has already arrived.
This article is based on reporting by The Guardian. Read the original article.
Originally published on theguardian.com
