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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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The true robot apocalypse where we all lose our jobs will only come when Clippy returns at the head of his AI army. It's a millenarian cult now and I'm going to treat it like one.

I'm sorry but the constant 'but AI is gaining in capabilities' ignores one thing- yes, yes it is, but those capabilities don't actually correspond to anything. Yes, it can reduce secretarial workload, and that will over time drastically reduce the number of secretaries, but mostly through not replacing retirees. Good thing the population's shrinking! In the meantime, I get a raise because AI hardware raises the wages for people that work on cooling systems(and electricians, too). The lower working class, that could theoretically be replaced by trained monkeys(but training the monkeys is not cost-competitive with $15/hr), yeah, a computer that knows how to flip burgers was possible in, like, 1982- still hasn't happened, because hands, you know, Claude doesn't have them. McDonald's uses lots of robots in their kitchen. None of them have hands, they're not a replacement for local teenagers.