Truth Beneath the Fiction
Why AI Scares White Collar Workers
People get jobs for 2 reasons.
Blue collar jobs are taken to pay pills. White collar jobs are taken to feel important.
The blue collar worker’s ability to pay bills depends on them being a hard worker. The white collar worker’s ability to pay bills depends on them being “smart.”
The blue collar worker has a major advantage here, because being a hard worker is a character trait, and can be mapped to many different jobs. But looking smart depends on one’s ability to do smart things, and this is where AI eradicates; AI has shown us that what we have been calling “smart” was more a self-serving narrative than reality.
The blue collar worker has something AI cannot take, or is at least far more robust. But the white collar worker relies on a long-standing lie; one that is dissipating as AI becomes more capable.
Blue collar work is based on movement. And, as I argue, it is movement that defines intelligence; not theorizing, analyzing, experimenting, formalizing, taxonomizing or credentializing — but movement.
This is epistemologically valid. It is movement that breeds the discoveries we later capture and label as knowledge. It has always been movement. Movement is the epistemic engine; the generative phenomenon that gives rise to usable information.
AI scares white collar workers, not because of some deep-seated virtue about retaining humanity’s essence, but because their self-worth relies on their intelligence reputation. It relies on a self-serving fairy tale about what “smart” looks like.
But smart is movement. It always has been. And AI will bring us full circle by forcing society to make this realization.
Blue collar jobs are taken to pay pills. White collar jobs are taken to feel important. One is about movement, the other about concocted storytelling.
Nature only keeps what is true beneath the fiction.
