Work

The public conversation about AI and work is stuck on the wrong question. “Will my job be replaced?” is the framing everyone reaches for, because it has a clean visual: a robot taking a specific seat. The headlines love it. Goldman: AI to replace 300 million jobs. McKinsey: half of all work activity automatable. The displacement frame promises an event — an announcement, a layoff, a press release — and the policy answers it suggests are familiar: retraining, universal basic income, regulation. ...

Revised on 2026-04-28 to v1.1. See revision history below. Look at any AI-skeptic feed in 2026 and you’ll see the word slop doing heavy work. It names something real: low-entropy, mass-produced text without an author behind it, flooding feeds, search results, comment sections, product reviews. There’s now a small genre of essays explaining why this is bad for civilization. Some of them are excellent. Some of them are slop themselves. I want to ask a different question. Not whether AI slop is bad — clearly some of it is — but why we’re so confident we can recognize it. Because if you squint at a lot of professional life, much of what we produce on a normal Tuesday already qualifies. Legal boilerplate. Corporate memo-speak. Quarterly reports that survive only because nobody reads them. Status updates that say nothing. Standardized medical notes whose function is mostly forensic. ...

In Airplane! (1980), Lloyd Bridges plays Steve McCroskey, an air-traffic controller running a disaster on the ground while a single pilot with food poisoning tries not to kill everyone on the plane above. McCroskey is on two phones at once. He’s barking at his wife. He’s pivoting to a subordinate mid-sentence. He’s drinking coffee, then cigarettes, then amphetamines, then glue, in that order. Every fifteen minutes or so, the camera cuts back to him and he delivers the same line with a slightly different noun: ...