futurism — Savva Pistolas

AI as a detector of work that needn't be

2026-03-08T00:00:00Z

Artificial Intelligence is the provision of an omni-capable tool that can be deployed seemingly anywhere in your life to produce instant, accurate, competent satisfaction of any requirement. Whether it’s anxiety quelling email drafts to reply to a complex ‘multi-stakeholder’ situation at work, or full-scale automation of your entire University degree - from labs, to reporting to reflection. AI fulfils requirement without fatigue, and without need for much affective input on your part. You can produce artefacts that fit the shape of ‘output’ for near-any system in work or study. Often this is labelled a productivity enhancer - enabling us to spin additional plates and optimise to the moon and back. As with the fundamental dialectical tradition where ‘progress’ and creation is inextricably linked with decay and destruction, let us reflect on what the contrary of our new era of AI productivity might be.

In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.

Large language models accomplish any task that can be ‘reduced’ to pattern discovery and subsequent exploration, so they absolutely smash coding, maths, chess, DNA, law, etc. Generally speaking, our species does well to produce machines that automate procedures, and AI is the most sophisticated iteration of this goal so far. Where AI succeeds at producing an effective artefact, the observer would do well to ask whether such an artefact was ever appropriate for a human being to produce in the first place. This piece explores whether AI can serve as our quiet advocate for rooting out poorly designed systems that sideline human experience and outcomes in favour of performative artefacts that allude to ‘productivity’ without any meaningful impact on our world.

Academia

Let us first look at academia in the UK up to at least MSc level for our assessment of pro or anti-human design; what was once an earnest commitment to development of knowledge derived from intrinsic motivation has become a hyper-marketised, cynical, and un-provenanced set of institutions that treat near-solely for profit. International students mill in and out of the country on restrictive visas, paying exorbitant fees to attend poorly planned and atomistic courses that are fulfilled by teaching assistants and professors who barely have the time to populate their material with the love and attention that good teaching needs. The focus is purely on an ‘output’ of degrees that can be leveraged in less economically developed nations, hung entirely on the walking-dead reputation of institutions that no longer have the capacity to separate their knowledge production from their profit production.

In such institutions the discretion, discussion, and initiative that come with true learning are inconveniences to be innovated away. What is really desirable and effective is for students to perform learning, and for faculty to perform teaching. Enter AI; the perfect companion to the ‘performance of academia’.

The faculty who work in good faith: the ‘good hearts in sick bodies’, are working hard to deal with the inundation of submissions that have been augmented or entirely produced by AI tooling. They wonder if there’s any way ‘back’ to a world where students are authentically engaged with material. The elephant in the staff room is that AI is just the whistleblower for the underlying and devastating reality that complex academic institutions removed authentic markers for student development from their feedback loops long ago. We’ve just now reached a stage where tech is available to ensure everyone can present as ‘up-to-speed’ instead of dropping out - which used to be conveniently leveraged to produce an appearance of quality and excellence as evidenced through completion rates and diverse student outcomes. Now of course, everyone gets a 2:1.

Using this particular lens, AI is not a hurdle for higher education to jump, but an assessment for it to improve in response to. Work that can be done without authentic, interpersonal, and embodied engagement with students is unlikely to be pro-human design in the first place! Systems that measure skill and competence without any relational or intersubjective artefacts at all are guaranteed to be atomised, alienating, and ultimately ineffective. The fact that robots can ace the courses from start to finish is the smoking gun.

No such automation is available for mentor-mentee (or master-apprentice) arrangements, where development is sewn into a lasting relationship that is reflected in work-objects that are all at once an opportunity, an assessment, and a reward; an embodied artefact of development and refinement over time. AI screams at us that we must urgently reform higher education (starting at assessment processes and working backwards!) to identify relational consensus from collaborative groups, fuelled by intrinsic motivation as the desirable output of university - and that this output is the precious input for knowledge-production that makes the world a better, safer, civil place to be.

Writing hard or hardly writing?

Take another example - writing. AI can easily produce a prosaic estimation of any particular subject matter, and inflate it to fit a style of your choosing. These words are the well-dressed zombies of the human corpus of text-gone-by: conjured to walk and dutifully attend to our inboxes, but without any soul! AI prose is for applications of the written word that require nothing but the utilitarian conveyance of data from box to box.

This is why it’s perfectly normal to use AI to write your emails, but utterly absurd to use it to write your reflective journal. Writing for outcomes is easily replaced by the bot, but writing for reflection, insight, and knowledge-production is not. So for most folks working day-to-day, the use of AI is just the technical actualisation of the scratch at the back of our brain when we write our press releases, our marketing copy, or our emoji-laden internal weekly-wins roundup newsletter for the team. We do of course know that buy-and-large the words we write at work are not a viable contribution to any great or meaningful human project - but instead the dutiful population of the working day with a performance of productivity; Our AI tools once again attend as exhibit-A in the trial that asks whether the system we’re producing these artefacts for is a humane one, or a machine that obviates human benefit for a performance of productivity.

Ask not what you can do with AI, but what AI can stop us doing at all.

Taken in aggregate, how much of our collective time do we waste on the production of artefacts that serve no purpose but to allude to the effectiveness of complex systems that don’t authentically serve any great human interest? How often do we reflect on our work in school or business, and realise that we are pretending to try while other pretend to listen?

When we ask what the place of this AI tooling in academia, work, and life is, we must make sure we do so circling the right systems as our scope of assessment, and with the right outcomes in mind! It ought never be a reflection about whether or not we need to be using AI for these varied applications, but whether we should be undertaking such ventures as human beings in the first place! And no, this is not an AI booster blog that suggests we’re mere moments away from ‘automating’ these tasks and flying to the moon in our open-claw productivity spaceships… Instead, it’s an earnest suggestion that AI (among it’s many fantastic uses) can be used as an effective mechanism for assessing the prevalence of anti-human design in complex systems.

The system is what the system does. The machine that counts beans also functions to tell us we are destined for greater things than just counting beans, provided we are wise enough to see how easily beans can be counted by machines, kind enough to share the bean counter, and brave enough to decide if we want to count the beans at all.

Wage slaves: the Neo way

2025-11-02T00:00:00Z

The new neo robot premiered this week, showcasing the $500 a month subscription that sees customers gain access to a general purpose home robot. The thrust of the proposition is that the hardware is attached to a smart AI that can both carry out autonomous problem-solving tasks such as cleaning up the house, loading the dishwasher, and folding clothes. You have access to an app that allows you to schedule certain tasks, and the bot even has a ‘companion’ mode so that isolated but monied old folks have access to an embodied computation process to differentiate between cayenne and paprika.

Watch the video for some context on the presentation of the thing - I think there’s something so interesting about the approach taken for this. It’s quite a nostalgia driven advert that positions the main speaker as explaining the robot to his grandma - effectively placing the robot in the established present as something to be caught up with, rather than a new proposition to be thought over or weighed up. It was an impressive pitch.

New hardware for an old enemy

The issue of course is that this is yet another massive smash and grab attempt on digital privacy in the global north, coupled with exploitation of the global south. First and foremost, all the popular media circulating of the bot shows the robot moving around home spaces inoffensively, inhuman in affect, but human in effect. The robot is however being teleoperated by someone using a virtual reality headset and controllers in almost all of the demonstrative media. While certain tasks (that are traditionally very easy for a human being to complete, but hard for a robot) can be given over to a problem solving AI, a lot of the activity that requires critical thinking and planning - such as cleaning an entire house, identifying and then taking out trash is actually intended to be handed over to a remote operator in India.

The clear and obvious definition of a fixed rate for unlimited human labour.

This means you have access to unlimited human labour for $500 a month. This economy is deliverable only by providing a physical actuator for human labour in another country. Of course it would be illegal to ship over these workers and pay them their local domestic salaries in the global north to complete unlimited labour in the home day and night. Here then is one of the brazen value propositions of the Neo bot: We will make your domestic workers as fungible in form as you treat them to be in your mind’s eye. Interchangeable, dismissible, and inhuman. Abstraction of relational and eye-to-eye accountability is a key part of economies of scale in complex systems reliant on human labour, and this is no different.

In addition to presenting a complex challenge to labour law, this open approach is an evolution on the history of AI-centred organisations; historically, we have many examples of modern ‘mechanical Turks’ - that is, dressing up human labour as an AI application (Like Amazon’s ‘just walk out’ store which was actually staffed remotely by hundreds of Indian workers). Neo does away with the cloak and dagger, the system is open and indeed proud of its value proposition to the customer. Having produced a mechanism where instead of utilising the sustained efforts of one person, you instead tap into a managed pool of labour that can access the same physical actuation in your living room - Neo intends to sell wage slavery by the back door, abstracting your enjoyment of domestic bliss from the fleet of workers who provide it to you.

Generally, when people become wealthy enough that they own a space they cannot possibly maintain by themselves, they employ domestic workers. This is a complicated affair because domestic workers are people with souls and material needs, and likely exist in material conditions very different to that of the person wealthy enough to pay someone to tend to their home. This means that the wealthy are inherently suspicious and distrusting of their domestic workers, they think they will steal from them or live in resentment of their employer. The wealthy have to witness the worker, and worse than this - they have to witness the worker witness them. Neo is a sanitising solution; finally, we have access to the effects of domestic workers, without the human inputs or considerations.

Best of all for the rich and suspicious: the sense organs afforded to the domestic worker to carry out their daily labour is a surveillance mechanism of their effectiveness and honesty. No more discretion, no more relationship, no more trust.

Data nightmare on legs

The box-tee baseball-cap surfer-dude tech-bro who runs the wage labourer laundering company identifies a gender essentialising data model he calls ‘big sister’, which is where you admit that you’re a ‘big brother’ company but promise that you’re using the data to do good. It seems like the company has made it to a working teleoperational robot that can do a few things well, and aims to capture data from it’s first commercial user base to train it’s model over time.

In addition to training off the manual labourers who perform domestic work via teleoperation (and building an incredibly valuable model most likely), this also means that your Neo bot is a data ingestion point, sucking up thousands of images of your home each day. The mind boggles at a future where law enforcement can get a floor plan of your house, or be let in at 2am by issuing a warrant to your domestic robot.

Conclusion

AI has a central thrust of trading obscene amounts of compute that have clear and irreversible impacts on the climate - disproportionately effecting the global south. We have a rich and long standing tradition of exploiting the economic positioning of the people who live in poorer countries, which was leveraged as society digitalised to conduct labour at a distance - Indian call centres became a meme out of this frequency.

The last 10 years of efforts in the AI space have built a vehicle for ramping up efforts to sell consumer conveniences in the global north that are thinly veiled and mechanically abstracted outsourcing of thinking and doing to people in other countries - largely the global south. All of this incarnate and refreshed in Neo: The robot that proves that the venn diagram of people who like to brush wage slavery under the rug and think that doing the dishes is below them is a circle.

Pointing at the mushrooms - Identifying our own digital colonisation

2025-03-04T00:00:00Z

Far and away the most popular misconception I have heard about the way digital advertising works is that our phones listen to us and create tailored advertising based on this. It is a very accessible point of conversation for people who maybe don’t know the workings of the mechanisms that make their technology work but can use pattern recognition to identify their interests being presented back to them on their devices.

The classic story is always that someone was having a conversation with a friend (That was just incredibly specific and unrelated to what we would normally talk about) and then shortly after that the person received adverts that were tailored around the subject of conversation so specifically that the only logical conclusion is that the phone was listening to their conversation.

While social media is objectively consuming your usage data to produce tailored advertisements - up to and including your message content, what you’re viewing, how you scroll, and who you’re talking to, it is not recording your voice in the background.

Aside from being an incredibly resource-intensive and impractical way to gather data that would be mostly pocket-noise, any recordings taken would be an observable action taken by software on your phone. Applications like facebook and instagram are constantly being researched and probed by security conscious researchers and hobbyists who are working to identify new ways that the social media giants are recording data on us. General audio recordings on your phone that capture conversation are not on these lists.

What then is happening? The answer is very much explainable by taking a left turn to talk about mycelium and mushrooms for a moment. Mycelium is the vegetative part of a fungus, consisting of a network of thread-like structures called hyphae. When a spore lands on a suitable ‘substrate’ they germinate and produce hyphae to ‘colonise the substrate’. This is where the hyphae consume the organic matter it’s attached to until the nutrient levels are completely depleted and the host is ‘saturated’ with the hyphae and mycelium. Once the substrate has been entirely drained of resources the fruiting body of the mycelium will form. The caps and stems we recognise as mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of these networks.

The final and triumphant mushroom is our evidence that the substrate it sits in has been fully consumed by the underground mycelium. The mushroom is the output of an invisible process.

Similarly, when we suggest that our phone ‘has to be listening to us’ to know our interests so well, we are only pointing at the mushroom. We have successfully identified the fruiting body of our total digital colonisation - but do not yet understand that the mycelium has taken root. We are the substrate and the fungus has successfully mapped and identified us, creating an accurate data profile.

This data profile (devastatingly) is sophisticated enough to begin predicting the conversations we may have, and who we may be having them with. Pointing at these adverts and suggesting that the phones are recording us is akin to pointing at a mushroom and suggesting we save the substrate. The substrate has been consumed, you are only observing the outcome.

People (myself included) have a tendency to think they are exempt from the workings of the machine, and that we are engaging sustainably with social media at a healthy distance. Sudden and unexpected accuracy of targeted advertising is a jarring reminder that this simply isn’t true. The moment of bafflement we experience when we look down and see such a precise marketisation of our own interests should always serve as a warning; We are the substrate! We have been successfully digitally colonised, the mushroom has bloomed.

It would be so much less worrisome if social media privacy abuse was as simple as recording you and spitting adverts back at you, but it is far more sophisticated and resource efficient than that. We are correct to assume that our phones ‘observe us’. It’s not using the microphone though, it’s certainly not ‘interacting’ with you, it’s just accepting everything that you’re offering up to it.

This observation is not a dialogic process, and not one that mimics a human conversation: you are simply being consumed. If you find that uncomfortable then you need to stop feeding the fungus.

The internet forest

2023-08-09T00:00:00Z