By Zershaaneh Qureshi | Watch on Youtube | Listen on Spotify | Read transcript
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Many AI researchers believe mass job displacement is coming — and some even think there’s a chance their technology will kill everyone. But they’re building it anyway. Writer and journalist Jasmine Sun has been documenting why from the inside.
Jasmine describes her work as an “anthropology of disruption.” She’s embedded herself in Silicon Valley’s AI subcultures — attending the parties and conferences, conducting off-the-record interviews — to understand the beliefs of the small group of people shaping this technology.
Some of her findings are unsettling. Asked what advice they’d give a normal 17-year-old, almost every AI researcher said the same thing: “I have no idea… It’s a really scary time. I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of jobs for them left.”
Their motives for building advanced AI are varied: a mix of optimism for humanity, techno-determinism, and a desire to secure their own future in the face of a possible “permanent underclass.” A few go even further, actually hoping for a world where machines — rather than humans — are running the show.
When the room can’t even agree on whether humans should stay in control, building a consensus on how to build AI safely gets much harder.
Beyond Silicon Valley, Jasmine’s also tracking the rise of “AI populists,” who see AI as the latest example of corporate elites concentrating their power at the expense of everyone else. In the US, populist sentiment about AI has mostly manifested in protests and votes against data centres. But sometimes, it has escalated into violence: a molotov cocktail thrown at Sam Altman’s house, and open fire on the home of a politician who’d backed a data centre. Jasmine thinks public anger will keep finding an outlet, one way or another, until people feel like they’ll actually share in AI’s gains.
In this interview with host Zershaaneh Qureshi, Jasmine Sun takes us inside the multifarious factions on AI’s bleeding edge. They also discuss:
This episode was recorded on June 4, 2026.
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Our production team includes:
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Jasmine Sun:I was doing these long-form AI ethnographies where I’d sit down with a random researcher at one of the frontier labs — sometimes a friend, sometimes an acquaintance, or a stranger.And I just asked them for an hour about their very broad views about AI, its impact on the world, and how optimistic and pessimistic they were. All off the record.
One thing that I noticed is: one of the questions I ask is, “What advice would you give to a normal 17 year old? Not like a super cracked, brilliant coder — but just pick a random state in America, normal 17 year old, they’re getting Bs in school, they’re not thinking about AI that much. How do you think that they can prepare for the future?”
What was really shocking to me was almost everyone I spoke to, regardless of their personal political beliefs — some of these are more libertarian types, some of these are more leftist types, some of these don’t care about politics at all, some of these have a wide range of beliefs about even AI itself — most people just told me: “Honestly, I have no idea what I’d tell that 17 year old. It’s a really scary time. I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of jobs for them left. I think they’re caught in this painful transition.”
On the economic front, it did become clear that there was this quiet consensus that, regardless of your future beliefs about whether there will be a
[permanent underclass]or more jobs than ever, the vast majority of people I know in the AI industry believe that in the near term, in the next few years, we are going to see mass job displacement. It’s going to be especially hard for a lot of young people, and a lot of current knowledge-work jobs are going to be disrupted and displaced completely.
Jasmine Sun:I have been worried in hearing, in just casual conversation, fairly prominent and influential people within the AI community express an indifference or even a preference to a world where AIs are making most of the decisions in society rather than humans.One of them, I won’t disclose people’s identities because they were
[Chatham House]or off-the-record contacts. But I’d be having a conversation with somebody at a conference workshop and they would say, “Everyone at this conference is so worried about what’s going to happen to humans in the post-AGI world. But frankly I’m more worried: what if the monkeys are still running the show?”And in this case the monkeys refers to the humans. He was more concerned that humans would still be in charge of governments, of corporations, of society because he had this view that AIs in their superintelligent existence were more deserving and more important to preserve a future world for.
Or I was talking to another very influential person in the AI scene and we were just on a walk and musing about: if all labour gets automated, what are people going to do? And he was like, “Maybe you’ll be like
[Nozick’s experience machine], and we’re all going to be wearing these VR headsets and watching perfectly personalised AI slop. So we don’t have any leverage in society, but in a way it’s very pleasurable and people are very happy.”And I was like, “I don’t know. Do you think that’s actually the world we want?” We’re going back and forth on it a bit. And he’s like, “Honestly, Jasmine, I’m a lot more interested in what the AIs are going to do with each other a thousand years from now than I am in what’s going to happen to humans next year.”
So, in a way, I think that there are people — influential and prominent people in the AI community — who, whether for intellectual reasons (as in a belief that the more intelligent species is more deserving, or simply because it’s a more interesting thought experiment) have arrived at an indifference towards whether humans stay in control. I find that quite worrying.
I don’t think it’s the majority belief or common belief within the AI labs or something like that, but I do think that it makes it very hard to move forward policy action, to move forward the safety conversation — if we’re not able to agree on even very foundational concepts such as: humans should stay in control of our governments, and it is possible to decide what technologies we build and don’t build, and our conversations should centre what happens to people.
Jasmine Sun:When some of the more accelerationist types have turned ‘doomer’ into this slur almost against people who want to slow down or to regulate AI or other technologies, they’re presenting a group of people as being anti-progress — or as being in opposition to this core belief in Silicon Valley that technological advancement is the only thing that has ever brought us growth, prosperity, equality, et cetera.If in all of history — in spite of the
[Industrial Revolution], automation, every wave of technology has brought on its own wave of disruptions — but if one were to believe so firmly in these apocalypse scenarios that you would be willing to slow down the only thing that might again bring us this future utopia that would keep the progress engine going, then you must be this kind of pessimistic, low agency, tech-sceptical kind of person, I suppose…I think people are seeing AI in the context of all the previous technological revolutions and thinking: “Yeah, these doomers would have still be on the farms being peasants. They would never have allowed the Industrial Revolution to happen.”
Zershaaneh Qureshi:… How does that actually affect what’s going on in the labs?
Jasmine Sun:I would say again, to me, a huge part of this is the talent-flows question. Just because talent is so scarce, as we see from the salaries that people are willing to pay, talent is incredibly scarce. So when you have these cultural beliefs, the main thing that they influence is actually what young people decide to do with their lives — and how many people decide to, say, work on safety vs working on capabilities…I think that the idea that trying to be careful — trying to be constrained about the way that you build technology — by labeling that as ‘doomery’ or low status, or as not being a pioneer and a serious builder, you’re basically preventing a bunch of very impressionable young people from going into a field that they otherwise would.
That’s to say nothing of obviously the policy conversation in DC, where ‘doomer’ has been employed as an extremely effective insult.
Jasmine Sun:I think that people are correctly assessing that there are some folks in Silicon Valley who are taking a gamble on their futures.Like you said, maybe the gamble is their jobs, maybe the gamble is their literal survival. Maybe the gamble is if they believe that AI is a bubble, it’s like a giant economic bubble. It’s true that AI is propping up American GDP growth, and it has been for the last year or so. I think St. Louis Fed said that
[39% of growth in 2025 came from data centres and AI].So when people understand that they have no capacity for democratic control or having a voice over the direction of the technology, when the leaders of those technologies are being very open about the risk that they think it’s going to pose and saying, “Hey, we’re going to do it anyway.”
For normal people, they actually have no leverage, right? They don’t know anyone who works in an AI lab. They can’t just tell them, “Hey, you should worry about this.” Most policy action has been extremely limited. Most people don’t know anyone in AI policy anyway. I think that when I see things like
[data centre protests]or[booing at college graduations]or whatever, I don’t necessarily think that they’re the smartest levers to make AI safer or whatever, but I think that they are the only levers that people feel that they have access to.And yeah, maybe Waymo is a little bit safer. Maybe ChatGPT helps me write my emails faster. I think people are willing to cop to those particular things. But when ‘write my emails faster’ is positioned against ‘this might take my job and kill us all,’ it just doesn’t feel like that good of a trade.
And then the AI people will say, but it also might cure cancer. And they’ll say, “Where is the cancer cure?” I hear this all the time. The
[AI CEOs keep talking about curing all diseases]. Where are the cures to the diseases? At a certain point, you’re just not a credible actor anymore. So I understand why the populist backlash is happening.I would like to see it funneled towards maybe more what I see as productive policy aims than protesting data centres and booing people at graduations and whatever. But it kind of makes sense to me.
Jasmine Sun:In the 20th century, we had a big wave of factory automation where a lot of the factories went from primarily humans on factory lines to humans managing machines, more so. Part of the way that this was negotiated, such that there was not a massive backlash and there weren’t waves of violence by workers who were being automated, was that these factories were mostly unionised.When they were mechanised, the people coming with the machines would meet with the union leaders, sit down at the bargaining table and say, “OK, first of all, we’re going to pitch this to you as it actually makes your job safer. You guys are really worried about workplace accidents, and this is going to reduce that. It gets at this issue that you guys are really worried about, we’re going to actually tie wage increases for workers to the increased productivity of these factories.”
Also you had just had this new social contract that FDR introduced to introduce
[better working legislation]in general.But more importantly, I think that there was a bargaining table and there were these mediating institutions of the unions between the people who were impacted by automation and the people introducing the automation. One really interesting thing I think about today is that there are no mediating institutions of that form. If you are a white collar worker in most industries, you are not part of any sort of organisation that is any sort of union or whatever.
So when your boss decides to maybe introduce AI, consider eliminating your job, there’s not actually anything that you can do about it. There’s not like a particular democratic or collective channel to express how you want AI to be incorporated into your life or your workplace.
I think that means that when people are really pissed off, they start going for social media cancellation and
[stochastic violence], and all these more diffuse forms of political backlash.I think I just have a view that public sentiment will find an outlet. And right now we’re just going to see quite a lot of it from very different directions, at least until people feel credibly reassured that they will have the downsides cap, that they will share in the growth that AI gives.
Jasmine Sun:A lot of folks who I know in San Francisco, in the AI research community, they’re really excited about UBI and they’re really excited about this infinite leisure point of view. When you test UBI with the public, it’s extremely unpopular because most Americans really want to work. They really want to have a job.Maybe they don’t want the job to be 40 hours a week, maybe they don’t want the job to be this or that. But fundamentally, people really want to work. Or when you ask people, “Do you want to live forever?” I think it’s actually quite a controversial poll.
A lot of people don’t want to live forever. The utopia that Silicon Valley and the AI industry is outlining is not actually a very compelling utopia to a lot of the other people in society, and they don’t realise that because they are in these very insular communities — then even your attempts at positive storytelling don’t really land…
I frankly think that at this point, in order to get the public back on board, you’re going to need to start giving people real material benefits. Or maybe it does look like the long-awaited cancer cure. I think if people see medical breakthroughs that are actually happening as a result of AI, then they are going to have a much more positive view on things.
When you look at David Shor’s Blue Rose polling, health advances and scientific advances as a result of AI are some of the highest-polling things among the public. So if it also looks like more investment is shifting towards domains that people are really excited about AI being a part of — and those are visible, those are well marketed — then I think that could also really work.
But again, when we talk about scientific and health advances, it can’t be these advertisements about plausible future things. I think we actually have to show that we are able to access cheaper or better, or whatever it is, whatever cures, treatments, et cetera, as a direct result of the AI companies and their wealth.