Let’s review.
Token costs are rising. In response, Meta and Amazon have shut down their internal “artificial intelligence” leaderboards; Microsoft has pushed its employees toward Copilot, and away from Claude Code’s rising costs. Uber has already capped its usage of LLMs internally, setting a monthly cap for every employee’s token spending. All of this is happening against the backdrop of the biggest “AI” platforms still borrowing money against hypothetical future returns, and
[markets are becoming increasingly skittish](https://apnews.com/article/stocks-markets-ai-tech-iran-0446d424c0bf722dd5b09d70b8a1da3d)over
[America’s big, all-encompassing bet on LLMs](https://www.ft.com/content/6cc87bd9-cb2f-4f82-99c5-c38748986a2e). And according to reports from
[NOTUS](https://www.notus.org/technology/trump-ai-stake-openai)and
Reuters, major “AI” providers are already having discussions with the United States government, in which they’re laying the groundwork for
“too big to fail”-style bailouts. This is all fine, of course. Totally fine, and great.
I’ve noted before that the so-called “AI” industry is not built on a sound financial foundation. 1 But in the last few weeks, it feels like new, even worse stress fractures have been racing across that foundation. And it’s been hard not to wonder what will happen next.
What will happen next?
I must admit I feel cursed by this stupid question. Why do we even ask it? I mean, look: my endocrine system is evolutionarily hardwired to worry about unseen threats. Something buried deep in my subconscious still thinks alpha predators lurk around every street corner, waiting to snack on my kidneys. “Something terrible is about to happen,” my hindbrain insists. “Look at the evidence before you. Anticipate. Prepare for the unseen danger,” it whines. “Shut up,” I hiss back, “I am basically a fancy typist with bad eyesight, there are no cheetahs lurking in the tall grass, I do not need this much cortisol.”
But professionally? Working in tech, we’re expected to care about this question. We’re supposed to have educated opinions about the future, to have some idea of what will happen next, all so that we can better plan for it. To design and build something that’ll last.
And I don’t know about you, but whenever I’ve been asked that question — “what’s going to happen next?” — it has changed its shape. When I first started talking about responsive design, I’d get asked to weigh in on the future of mobile, or what the then-explosive levels of device diversity might look like in a few years’ time. A few years after that, I started getting questions about automated website builders, and how they might change design.
I can’t see the future, but I can state a blindingly obvious thing. None of these are questions about technology. These are all questions about work: what it might look like in the future and, most importantly, whether or not the person asking will even have a place in that future. That’s the real question behind the question, and it’s always tinged with worry or fear. And now, with hundreds of thousands of tech workers having lost their jobs since ChatGPT was released, there are a lot more of us asking the question. All of us would very, very, very much like to know what happens next.
I have no answers here. But two things come to mind.
Here’s the first one.
What will happen next?
When I’m asked about where “AI” might be going, I don’t think about the terrifyingly large bubble that’s (possibly? probably? definitely?) about to pop; I don’t think of the careers, lives, and futures that will be upended by that “market correction”; I don’t think about the potential after a crash for these big, lumbering, literally-world-devouring centralized platforms to be replaced by smaller local models. 2 Instead, when I hear that question these days —
what will happen next?— I think about
William Gibsonand plastics. “And
theseguys were very common,” [Gibson] went on, taking down a small plastic spaceman: red, wearing an elaborately earmuffed helmet with an antenna on top. “These spacemen were dime-store toys at a time — which I can actually remember! — when cheap plastics were still weirdly novel. Like Gore-Tex or something. You’d ask, ‘What is it made of?’ ” He looked wistful, then thoughtful. “I’ve decided that one of the most significant things I ever saw in my life was the arrival of completely ubiquitous injection-molded plastics. I was certainly aware of them as the onset of something new. They cost practically nothing. But no one had any idea what a disaster we were all witnessing. Now the oceans are full of it.” He handed the spaceman to me. I hefted it, weightless, in my palm — an antique bit of misread future.
I’ve seen Gibson use this line in a few interviews. And when he does, he’s occasionally mentioned how he can browse through old photographs, and see all the toys he was raised on: crafted little objects made of cloth, wood, tin, even paper. But after a certain point, it’s like a switch gets flipped — and then he’s leafing through picture after picture of nothing but synthetic, injection-molded playthings.
I’ve been haunted by this story since the first time I read it. And it’s useful for me when I think about where we are now, and where we might go from here.
Just to be clear: I don’t think LLMs will be with us for long, at least not in their current form. But I do think that we’re living through a period of generational damage, one that will take years to repair, if not decades. For the last few years we have been watching a failed technology being deployed at scale: a technology built upon theft; upon inaccessible code; upon a flagrant disregard for work and for workers; upon ruinous environmental harms. After more than three years, “AI” has produced very little financial benefit outside of the largest companies hawking it. And in that time, after years of near-constant “AI” layoffs, I have heard and read so many accounts of people wondering if there’s still a place for them in the industry. 3 I personally have several friends who have already left the industry.
When I say the phrase “generational damage,” I mean it.
So, no: I don’t know precisely what will happen next. But I’ve come to realize the outcomes matter a lot less than the harms we’re watching unfold right now. Whether the bubble pops or doesn’t, I feel confident we’ll look back at the first few years of “artificial intelligence” much as Gibson does a toy astronaut: as a herald we ignored, as an antique bit of misread future.
Second thing. And it’s about the question itself.
What will happen next?
I’ve been thinking about this question, like, structurally. Isn’t the phrasing a bit…passive? No judgment intended at all here, mind. I’m just struck by the fact that it’s posed from a place of observation. The person asking the question is an onlooker, a spectator; they’re trying to anticipate how events in front of us might be unfolding, and guess where the river might flow next. And when we ask ourselves what might come next — for “AI,” for the industry, for the future of our work within both — I bet we could start asking another question.
Maybe it’s this one:
What do you want to happen next?
Halfway through my unions book, I sat down with Jacky about some of the organizing conversations he’d participated in. We were talking about some brainstorming sessions he’d been in at both companies, in which he and his coworkers were dreaming up ideas for what they might include in [their union contract] — ideas people had thrown around for what their contracts could look like. Things like, “What if our parental leave policy lasted five years?” And: “Could our contract have mandated that 20 percent of every sprint was spent on tech debt?”
Alciné hastened to note that none of these proposals ever appeared at a bargaining table; they were just ideas that came up in brainstorming sessions. But that’s what I think is so valuable about the collective bargaining process, and the discussions around them: that these discussions are meant to be
generative.
This was the common thread that ran through every single one of the interviews I conducted for the book. Amid layoffs, intimidation, the sheer difficulty of organizing, every person I spoke with touched on just how the process opened up new possibilities for them. A new future — and it was a future they wanted to fight for.
Amid all this talk about the inevitability of “AI”, I think it’s okay for us to ask what kind of future we want, and then move toward it together. And it’s already happening across the industry. ProPublica’s guild conducted a strike earlier this year, in part to win contract language that would prohibit layoffs resulting from “AI” adoption. UK workers at DeepMind, Google’s AI Research Lab, voted to unionize, in part to block usage of their employer’s models in military contracts. Thousands of tech workers in the University of California system voted to unionize, and gained the right to bargain over the use of “AI” tools in the workplace. DAIR has released a hub filled with resources for people looking to push back against “AI” and automation at work.
I think we can figure out our future together, right now. And as Mandy reminds us, it all starts with conversation. We have to talk with our friends, colleagues, and coworkers. We have to talk about our concerns, and what we wish were different. We have to map out how we’ll collectively instrument change in our workplaces, and in our industries.
I want to fix this industry. I want you to have a place in it. I want us to have a place in it. Maybe you do, too.
So, really: what do you want to happen next? I’ve got some ideas, but I’d love to hear yours.
Footnotes #
As an aside: how is it that
this McSweeney’s articlewent harder on the circular financing underpinning “AI” than, like, any other business publication in the last few years? Yes I’ll hold↩︎Well, I don’t
justthink about these things.↩︎Ky’s essayandEric’s essayare just two examples I could name; I’ve read and heard dozens of other accounts just as moving. (And heartbreaking.)↩︎