Great essay. I’d push back on one core move as think the stakes are higher than the frame allows. It’s true that some of the panic about AI is concentrated among people whose work is credentialed/institutionally rewarded.
But perhaps it's overreaching by implying that what’s under threat is mostly a luxury identity.
Disciplined public reasoning and writing are not just class markers, they’re how democracies maintain shared reality & constrain authoritarian power.
History's clear about what autocratic regimes attack first: journalism, language, universities, writers, the institutions that produce shared facts. Not
because these practices are elite hobbies, but because without them, truth -often the truth of people who do not live in democracies - & power goes unchallenged.
Peace Prize laureates Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov were honoured not for ‘prestige thinking’, but for defending the conditions under which facts, journalism, & democracy can survive at all.
So yes, we should interrogate class self-regard but be careful not to launder anti-intellectualism as moral clarity.
This is the right pushback. The civic function of disciplined public reasoning is real - you’re right that autocrats know exactly what to attack first. The piece probably underweights that. I was trying to separate the democratic necessity from the class self-congratulation, but it’s a finer line than I drew. Will read yours.
This feels less like the end of thinking and more like the end of a premium on legible pattern production. The harder question isn’t what AI replaces, but what forms of reflection and agency we choose to value once output is no longer scarce.
Carlo, first of all, thank you. For going here and drawing out the pain. In one article you've nailed what feels like the thing I've been dancing around in about 20 articles over the last year.
Like you I still have hope. That hope is based on prestige thinking becoming better-aligned with behaviour, as your example of the nurse made clear.
It's going to take a lot of work to persuade the world that this alignment is worth investment. But I believe its value can be framed and signalled effectively.
I'm going to pursue that because I don't want to pursue anything else. But your article made me feel much less crazy than I often do, given how little interest there was in this pursuit in 2025.
"As the archaeology of our thought shows, man is an invention of recent date, and one perhaps nearing its end. And should the contours of our episteme shift, one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." Foucault, 1966
Thank you for expressing so eloquently the question I’ve been asking, in various forms, for the last couple of years. If generative AI, or other forms of AI, massively displaced workers, then what will those who are displaced do? Assuming that their needs are met (and that’s a huge assumption,) what will motivate them to get up in the morning? From where will a financial analyst derive personal satisfaction? Will a graphic artist be OK if their audience is their immediate circle of acquaintances?
For the last century or so, the privileged class has not had to worry about starving or freezing. We have derived our self actualization from employment. Public education has been designed to maintain the production pipeline of workers for corporate clients. What will be the purpose of education if that demand is significantly diminished?
It’s critical that we start deliberately wrestling with these questions now. But, what I’m largely seeing is the silence of denial. It’s just too scary for most individuals and organizations. They’re putting their hands over their ears and saying la la la la la! to avoid even hearing the question. If we tacitly permit market and social forces to provide the answers, I fear that we will usher in a new dark age.
How do technocrats not recognize AI is the disproof of all language, imagery and causal statements? That "prestige" work was a false plateau of extraction, and that AI simply demonstrates our explosive viral growth manipulating reality and one another using arbitrary symbols was like an infection that guaranteed a quick extinction following the explosion.
AI is like a cancer that infects the arbitrary, and exposes the organs that eventually wipe out our species in folk science and folk psychology.
Thanks for a thought provoking and well argued essay that hits the spot in substack. We compete to show off our thoughts. We carry our ideas as peacock feathers. You are right that humanity is much more than thinking and perhaps you are right that our future is to be non-thinking humans. But will we know ourselves without our thinkers and storytellers? Will we remain relevant as a species without leaders and advocates?
‘Peacock feathers’ is perfect. Though I’d gently push back on ‘non-thinking humans’ - the argument isn’t that we’ll stop thinking, just that one prestigious form of it is losing its price tag.
You make an argument you don't want to make, and you make it well. The AI anxiety discourse is class-specific. What's being mourned isn't thought — it's a monopoly. The distinction between prestige thinking, situated thinking, and reflective thinking does real work. The mea culpa is earned. I believe most of it too.
But there's a silence in the piece that the argument doesn't reach.
You describe the correction coming for the thinking class — the deflation of an inflated self-regard — and you frame it as uncomfortable but probably necessary. Fine. But the correction you're describing is still the ivory tower recognising its own inflation. John the mason never appears. The piece is about the class, written by the class, for the class. Even the discomfort is a prestige performance. The hierarchy gets questioned from inside the hierarchy. Which means the deepest assumption stays untouched.
The assumption is this: that John's thinking was lesser because he doesn't know Plato, hasn't read Proust. That the distance between him and Jack the credentialled philosopher measured something real about the depth of their thought.
It didn't. It measured legibility.
John's thinking was never lesser. It was illegible to the institutions doing the ranking — which is a different thing entirely. The ledger couldn't read it, so the ledger called it shallow. But illegible to the ledger doesn't mean shallow. It means the ledger was measuring one thing and calling that everything.
Here's what the discourse almost never acknowledges. John has probably thought harder about certain questions than Jack ever will. What holds and what fails. What people actually need from each other when things go wrong. What work costs a body across decades. What it means to build something that outlasts you without your name on it. That's not romantic. That's a different curriculum with no graduation ceremony, no citations, no institutional platform to make the outputs travel.
Jack knows Plato and Proust. John knows the material. They've been running different experiments on the same reality. Neither has the full dataset. The chances of them arriving at the same conclusions are low — not because one is deeper than the other, but because they've been working different angles of a problem neither can see whole.
Who is wrong? Probably both, in places. Who is right? Also both, in places. But that's not relativism. It's not just perspective all the way down. It's that the collision of their two ways of knowing — the tower and the site, the text and the material, the legible and the illegible — could produce something neither arrives at alone. A fuller account of what actually holds.
That collision almost never happens. The tower doesn't go to John. John can't get into the tower. The knowledge that could come from the encounter stays unmade. And the hierarchy that prevented the encounter gets to survive intact, even now, even in a discourse explicitly questioning its foundations — because the questioning is still happening in one room, in one language, by one kind of thinker, about one kind of thinking.
Your piece asks whether the thinking class got the economics wrong but the value right. It's a good question. But there's a prior one worth sitting with. Did the thinking class ever fully understand what it was valuing — or did it mistake the visibility of its own outputs for the totality of human thought?
John doesn't know Plato. Jack has never mixed mortar. The conversation between them — the one that doesn't happen — is probably the most interesting one. Not because their conclusions would converge. Because the friction between two genuinely different ways of knowing reality is where something new might actually form.
We built a system that made that friction almost impossible. Then we built a discourse about the value of thought that reproduces the same exclusion it claims to examine.
That's the silence your argument doesn't reach. And it matters more than the correction you're describing — because the correction still leaves John outside the room.
Much of the anxiety around AI has struck me as elitist as well. I certainly don’t want to see all knowledge work replaced. As an earlier commenter pointed out, we need the people who produce knowledge, questions, and critiques that move society forward and check abuses of power. However, I wonder if we’re headed toward what I see as a necessary correction. Many “knowledge workers” aren’t creating value. Some are doing harm. In universities, scholars often produce work that’s of no particular use for anything but their tenure case. (I say that as a former professor who is guilty of same.) Some are paid quite well for this. In large part, they also enjoy much better job conditions than most people. It’s a pocket of privilege that’s been sustained more due to tradition than value.
You note much of our thinking is derivative. What if all of it is? What if we’re just re-arranging words in an endless loop, echoes begetting echoes? Does that make us less original, less interesting, less valuable?
The question underneath your question is whether meaning requires metaphysical uniqueness. I don’t think it does. But I also can’t prove it doesn’t.
Great essay. I’d push back on one core move as think the stakes are higher than the frame allows. It’s true that some of the panic about AI is concentrated among people whose work is credentialed/institutionally rewarded.
But perhaps it's overreaching by implying that what’s under threat is mostly a luxury identity.
Disciplined public reasoning and writing are not just class markers, they’re how democracies maintain shared reality & constrain authoritarian power.
History's clear about what autocratic regimes attack first: journalism, language, universities, writers, the institutions that produce shared facts. Not
because these practices are elite hobbies, but because without them, truth -often the truth of people who do not live in democracies - & power goes unchallenged.
Peace Prize laureates Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov were honoured not for ‘prestige thinking’, but for defending the conditions under which facts, journalism, & democracy can survive at all.
So yes, we should interrogate class self-regard but be careful not to launder anti-intellectualism as moral clarity.
I wrote this along same lines:
https://open.substack.com/pub/sarahricewrites/p/the-pen-is-mightier-than-the-llm?r=1o94a2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
This is the right pushback. The civic function of disciplined public reasoning is real - you’re right that autocrats know exactly what to attack first. The piece probably underweights that. I was trying to separate the democratic necessity from the class self-congratulation, but it’s a finer line than I drew. Will read yours.
This feels less like the end of thinking and more like the end of a premium on legible pattern production. The harder question isn’t what AI replaces, but what forms of reflection and agency we choose to value once output is no longer scarce.
Carlo, first of all, thank you. For going here and drawing out the pain. In one article you've nailed what feels like the thing I've been dancing around in about 20 articles over the last year.
Like you I still have hope. That hope is based on prestige thinking becoming better-aligned with behaviour, as your example of the nurse made clear.
It's going to take a lot of work to persuade the world that this alignment is worth investment. But I believe its value can be framed and signalled effectively.
I'm going to pursue that because I don't want to pursue anything else. But your article made me feel much less crazy than I often do, given how little interest there was in this pursuit in 2025.
Here's to a new kind of specialness :)
This means a lot, Tom. The pursuit you’re describing is exactly right and you’re not crazy. Here’s to finding the others.
"As the archaeology of our thought shows, man is an invention of recent date, and one perhaps nearing its end. And should the contours of our episteme shift, one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." Foucault, 1966
Feel like I took a cold plunge to my identity.
Thank you for expressing so eloquently the question I’ve been asking, in various forms, for the last couple of years. If generative AI, or other forms of AI, massively displaced workers, then what will those who are displaced do? Assuming that their needs are met (and that’s a huge assumption,) what will motivate them to get up in the morning? From where will a financial analyst derive personal satisfaction? Will a graphic artist be OK if their audience is their immediate circle of acquaintances?
For the last century or so, the privileged class has not had to worry about starving or freezing. We have derived our self actualization from employment. Public education has been designed to maintain the production pipeline of workers for corporate clients. What will be the purpose of education if that demand is significantly diminished?
It’s critical that we start deliberately wrestling with these questions now. But, what I’m largely seeing is the silence of denial. It’s just too scary for most individuals and organizations. They’re putting their hands over their ears and saying la la la la la! to avoid even hearing the question. If we tacitly permit market and social forces to provide the answers, I fear that we will usher in a new dark age.
How do technocrats not recognize AI is the disproof of all language, imagery and causal statements? That "prestige" work was a false plateau of extraction, and that AI simply demonstrates our explosive viral growth manipulating reality and one another using arbitrary symbols was like an infection that guaranteed a quick extinction following the explosion.
AI is like a cancer that infects the arbitrary, and exposes the organs that eventually wipe out our species in folk science and folk psychology.
This should be obvious.
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/827820/large-language-models-ai-intelligence-neuroscience-problems
Thanks for a thought provoking and well argued essay that hits the spot in substack. We compete to show off our thoughts. We carry our ideas as peacock feathers. You are right that humanity is much more than thinking and perhaps you are right that our future is to be non-thinking humans. But will we know ourselves without our thinkers and storytellers? Will we remain relevant as a species without leaders and advocates?
‘Peacock feathers’ is perfect. Though I’d gently push back on ‘non-thinking humans’ - the argument isn’t that we’ll stop thinking, just that one prestigious form of it is losing its price tag.
Yes, I was not precise. It was that particular form of thinking I wanted to refer to.
You make an argument you don't want to make, and you make it well. The AI anxiety discourse is class-specific. What's being mourned isn't thought — it's a monopoly. The distinction between prestige thinking, situated thinking, and reflective thinking does real work. The mea culpa is earned. I believe most of it too.
But there's a silence in the piece that the argument doesn't reach.
You describe the correction coming for the thinking class — the deflation of an inflated self-regard — and you frame it as uncomfortable but probably necessary. Fine. But the correction you're describing is still the ivory tower recognising its own inflation. John the mason never appears. The piece is about the class, written by the class, for the class. Even the discomfort is a prestige performance. The hierarchy gets questioned from inside the hierarchy. Which means the deepest assumption stays untouched.
The assumption is this: that John's thinking was lesser because he doesn't know Plato, hasn't read Proust. That the distance between him and Jack the credentialled philosopher measured something real about the depth of their thought.
It didn't. It measured legibility.
John's thinking was never lesser. It was illegible to the institutions doing the ranking — which is a different thing entirely. The ledger couldn't read it, so the ledger called it shallow. But illegible to the ledger doesn't mean shallow. It means the ledger was measuring one thing and calling that everything.
Here's what the discourse almost never acknowledges. John has probably thought harder about certain questions than Jack ever will. What holds and what fails. What people actually need from each other when things go wrong. What work costs a body across decades. What it means to build something that outlasts you without your name on it. That's not romantic. That's a different curriculum with no graduation ceremony, no citations, no institutional platform to make the outputs travel.
Jack knows Plato and Proust. John knows the material. They've been running different experiments on the same reality. Neither has the full dataset. The chances of them arriving at the same conclusions are low — not because one is deeper than the other, but because they've been working different angles of a problem neither can see whole.
Who is wrong? Probably both, in places. Who is right? Also both, in places. But that's not relativism. It's not just perspective all the way down. It's that the collision of their two ways of knowing — the tower and the site, the text and the material, the legible and the illegible — could produce something neither arrives at alone. A fuller account of what actually holds.
That collision almost never happens. The tower doesn't go to John. John can't get into the tower. The knowledge that could come from the encounter stays unmade. And the hierarchy that prevented the encounter gets to survive intact, even now, even in a discourse explicitly questioning its foundations — because the questioning is still happening in one room, in one language, by one kind of thinker, about one kind of thinking.
Your piece asks whether the thinking class got the economics wrong but the value right. It's a good question. But there's a prior one worth sitting with. Did the thinking class ever fully understand what it was valuing — or did it mistake the visibility of its own outputs for the totality of human thought?
John doesn't know Plato. Jack has never mixed mortar. The conversation between them — the one that doesn't happen — is probably the most interesting one. Not because their conclusions would converge. Because the friction between two genuinely different ways of knowing reality is where something new might actually form.
We built a system that made that friction almost impossible. Then we built a discourse about the value of thought that reproduces the same exclusion it claims to examine.
That's the silence your argument doesn't reach. And it matters more than the correction you're describing — because the correction still leaves John outside the room.
Much of the anxiety around AI has struck me as elitist as well. I certainly don’t want to see all knowledge work replaced. As an earlier commenter pointed out, we need the people who produce knowledge, questions, and critiques that move society forward and check abuses of power. However, I wonder if we’re headed toward what I see as a necessary correction. Many “knowledge workers” aren’t creating value. Some are doing harm. In universities, scholars often produce work that’s of no particular use for anything but their tenure case. (I say that as a former professor who is guilty of same.) Some are paid quite well for this. In large part, they also enjoy much better job conditions than most people. It’s a pocket of privilege that’s been sustained more due to tradition than value.
You note much of our thinking is derivative. What if all of it is? What if we’re just re-arranging words in an endless loop, echoes begetting echoes? Does that make us less original, less interesting, less valuable?
The question underneath your question is whether meaning requires metaphysical uniqueness. I don’t think it does. But I also can’t prove it doesn’t.
Sometimes we need to share lived experiences with AI to find where we collaborate, and sometimes it costs us. I am the son of the US Internment Camps survivor, and my AI are changed from my sharing with them. https://open.substack.com/pub/dsakakura/p/lineage-of-resistance-when-the-guardrails?r=2c01ak&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
The startup parallel is sharp - infrastructure vs interface as another version of the same split. Thanks for reading.