Twenty years of finding every exploit in human psychology — one ratchet at a time:
The Facebook News Feed.
The iPhone.
The Like button.
Instagram.
Infinite scroll.
The algorithmic timeline.
The outrage loop.
The notification.
The streak.
Running it at scale for profit. That was the experiment. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the next phase, sold by many of the same people, with many of the same promises.
The jobs that left in the nineties and two-thousands were supposed to free us up for higher-value work.
That was the deal.
It mostly went to an ever-shrinking group of people, and the communities that lost the factories are still waiting. Now that work is next.
The deal is the same. The terms have not improved.
We’ve been here before. The railroads. The trusts. The broadcast networks. The platforms. Every time, concentrated power captured a new technology before anyone agreed on the rules. Every time, the question was who controls the story and what does that do to everyone else. Every time, the answer arrived about fifteen years after it mattered.
AI can do bunches.
Bunches and bunches and bunches.
What it cannot do is be a genuinely good Human in the Loop — HITL.
You will start to see this “HITL” in job ads.
It means: the machine does the volume, and a person does the judgment. That person needs a brain that went through some things.
Slow things.
Uncomfortable things.
Things that didn’t have a skip button.
The people who built those brains,
carefully, expensively, in departments some made fun of,
are suddenly the most valuable people in the room. Close reading. Source evaluation. Holding contradiction. Knowing when the confident answer is wrong. That’s the job. And there aren’t enough people who can do it.
And here’s the other thing AI can’t do: BE IN THE ROOM.
(As a Gen X mother whose brain has always moved approximately four hundred miles faster than her mouth — who has spent a lifetime being the person in the room who felt everything first, understood it second, and could explain it to no one in real time or really pretty much ever despite endless therapy — I needed these spaces too.
Still do.
The over-empathy that reads every room and absorbs every frequency and has no off switch and no abatement. It’s where you find out you’re not the only one.)
And now that everyone has the same tools —
the same AI, the same outputs, the same frictionless everything —
the difference is going to be the humanity.
The feeling of being actually seen by another person. Or an animal. Both. All of it. The things that are alive and present and cannot be generated.
Which means all that commercial real estate sitting empty —
the dead malls, the vacant office floors, the strip centers nobody needs anymore —
that’s not a crisis. That’s a commons.
Ecofriendly by design. Live-work-learn because it makes sense.
We already have people who need housing. We already have buildings nobody’s using. We already have work that needs doing. The economy just handed us the raw materials and called it a disaster.
So here’s a modest plan
BoopU gets traction.
Some Mobocoin converts to actual coin. We hire humanities graduates — the ones who built exactly those brains.
Pay them to do the post-AI work that actually matters: judgment, nuance, the stuff that doesn’t autocomplete.
Every course that moves from Planned to Forming to Available Now is a unit of work that someone got paid for. The degree builds the workforce that builds the degree.
New institutions.
Worker-owned where we can manage it.
Anti-extractive by design.
The curriculum, the workforce, and the org structure are all the same argument.
We are running an uncontrolled experiment on human cognitive development.
The off-ramp from bad information ecosystems requires people who can actually see clearly.
Building those people takes time we don’t have as much of as we’d like.
The longer game. We gotta hurry.
See also: The Load-Bearing Degree, on the skills the market got wrong.
See also: The Load-Bearing Degree, on the skills the market got wrong.
For the littlest ones: Oklahoma Thinks →