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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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I feel roughly the same. I think that AI will destroy a bunch of jobs that were the intellectual equivalent of menial labor, but create an equal or greater number of creative jobs. If you're writing formulaic grant proposals or building websites with React then AI is coming for your job, but that's not a bad thing. An LLM can replace a web designer, but only a full-blown strong AI can replace the UX designer whose job it is to tell the LLM what website to make.

LLMs won't replace the actual nerds. It'll replace the 0.5X programmers, the offshore assets, the email-senders, the box-tickers, and the bureaucrats. On a fundamental level there will still need to be someone to tell the AI what to do.

I feel roughly the same. I think that AI will destroy a bunch of jobs that were the intellectual equivalent of menial labor, but create an equal or greater number of creative jobs.

This is only true if AI plateaus. If it gets even a couple dozen IQ points smarter, those creative jobs are gone, too. And I don't see any indication of AI plateauing.

I feel like this is bad for mental health/fertility unless we have off-ramps for people. I don’t think there will be enough status seats for the highly intelligent which means more artificial status hierarchy (like woke). This basically comes down to everyone needs to be a playable character. Is this a good thing in society?

Even if someone is highly agentic I feel like people need breaks in life where they can just live and not be building. It gets really hard to have a family if you always need to be in a risk seat and can never step back into a support seat doing boring white caller work.