The future may not be redistribution. It may be surveillance, control, repression
MIT has come out with a paper on AI and government repression that uses a rigorous model to show what most of us already knew through lived experience, intuition and pattern recognition. The abstract concludes:
[C]apital accumulation and thus greater automation encourages the capitalists to support a coup against democracy and set up a repressive system.
It conveniently doesn’t seem to offer any solutions. But it is validating to see the technical reasoning behind the phenomenon we’re witnessing.
Milan professor, Valerio Capraro, summarizes it like this.
As automation shifts income from labor to capital, workers become poorer, revolt becomes more likely, and elites face a choice: redistribute, slow automation, or repress.
But here is the issue: redistribution becomes more expensive precisely when automation makes labor less necessary.
Repression, by contrast, becomes relatively more attractive.
Therefore, elites may prefer repression to slowing down automation or redistributing its gains. This is the dark political economy of AI.
So far, much of the debate has been about: “AI may take your job.”
But economistar Daron Acemoglu, and colleagues Arda Gitmez, and Mehdi Shadmehr make a deeper point: AI may reduce the political need to care whether you have a job.
The future may not be redistribution. It may be surveillance, control, repression.
Full Paper →https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2026-06/Automation%20and%20Repression.pdf
Invoking AI’s harm to critical thinking is a weak defence for universities
Calls to ditch AI because it is destroying students’ analytical skills ignore institutions’ questionable record at developing complex reasoning, says Ian Richardson
A historical pattern has emerged in higher education when it comes to new technology. Something arrives. Institutions recoil. Arguments are voiced about standards, about the sacred nature of knowledge, about the irreplaceable human element of learning. In time, the technology is accepted and the arguments are quietly retired. Until the next thing arrives – when the same reassuringly familiar laments can be aired once again.
It’s interesting to question where we might have been if only we’d managed to resist the tide of technological “progress”. The printing press wouldn’t have debased the authority of texts by disintermediating venerable and learned hands. The photocopier wouldn’t have allowed accumulation of vast quantities of text without proper engagement. Scientific calculators wouldn’t have hollowed out numerical intuition. Searchable databases wouldn’t have stripped away contextual judgement by preventing us from spending years thumbing card indexes and scouring dog-eared journals. Word processors wouldn’t have produced sprawling, undisciplined prose. The internet wouldn’t have degraded research quality and distracted lazy students with a swamp of unreliable content.
Each generation of educators has convinced itself that new technology poses a unique threat to authentic learning, intellectual rigour and human connection – only for those fears to fade as the technology becomes normalised. It’s a pattern that reveals a principled and cautious engagement with technological change and, more discreetly, a near-perfect record of confusing intellectual virtue with institutional and parochial self-interest.
In a Guardian article published on 10 March, a dozen humanities professors describe mostly despairing experiences at the arrival of artificial intelligence in their classrooms. “It’s driving so many of us up the wall,” confided one. Another described it as “the bane of [her] existence” and wished she could “push ChatGPT off a cliff”. Elsewhere, the question of what it would do for us as a species reflected broader existential concerns at AI’s emergence ..
These are not fringe voices. They’re senior academics at Stanford, Berkeley and Penn State, among others. And the argument they’re making is, at its heart, a straightforward one: AI threatens critical thinking, and critical thinking is what universities exist to cultivate.
It’s a powerful argument, and one that has become a rallying cry within the sector. It’s also, when held up to even modest scrutiny, one that many institutions are making with little support beyond fine words and good intentions.
It’s 15 years since Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift was dropped on an unsuspecting sector, highlighting the roughly 45 per cent of US undergraduates who demonstrated no significant improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing skills during their first two years of college – findings that were later extended to all years of college life and, the authors claimed, left graduates poorly prepared for workforce transition.
Not everyone agreed, of course. Some suggested flawed methods could account for the findings, while others pointed to differences between disciplines. Elsewhere, studies were produced showing higher levels of gain. Nevertheless, the central criticism landed, and the sector was clearly on the defensive. Outcome-based learning approaches were embedded, writing across the curriculum programmes were expanded, “high-impact practices” were formalised, and the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA/CLA+) was adopted by many as a measure of value-added learning. These developments, initiated in the US, have significantly influenced international approaches – notably through quality assurance and accreditation frameworks designed to address rising demands for accountability.
However, a decade later, the 2022 OECD report Does Higher Education Teach Students to Think Critically?, which assessed more than 120,000 students across six countries, found only a modest improvement in students’ abilities. Given “the importance that most higher education programmes attach to promoting critical thinking skills, the learning gain is smaller than could be expected”, it reported. With half of all exiting students performing at the two lowest levels of mastery, the conclusion was unequivocal: a university qualification is not a reliable measure of critical thinking expected by the global marketplace.
Despite this, critical thinking appears prominently in institutional mission statements, quality frameworks, programme descriptions and learning outcomes across the sector. But the gap between aspiration and evidenced attainment remains wide – and it’s clear that institutions have been evasive in this area when it comes to comparative measures. The OECD’s Ahelo project, for instance, was abandoned in 2015 because of insufficient institutional support – notably from elite universities. As Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD, said at the time, the biggest resistance had come “from those institutions that fear they will never do as well as their reputation suggests”.
So what is actually being defended in the Guardian article?
The professors interviewed are intelligent people grappling with a genuine disruption. AI does present real challenges to meaningful assessment. The case for preserving the productive difficulty of unaided thought – the struggle with a text, the construction of an argument from scratch – is defensible and important. The argument that universities must move towards metacognition, teaching students to interrogate their own reasoning rather than merely deploying it, reflects serious engagement.
But the framing – seriously? “Self-lobotomisation.” Students deliberately made “helpless” by tech companies. “Intellectual ravages.” AI threatening us “as a species”. Beneath the intellectual veneer lies an emotional texture entirely familiar from the history of technological resistance: the language of desecration, of theft, of an irreplaceable thing in jeopardy.
And what is this irreplaceable thing, exactly – unaided human cognition, or something else entirely? For many, the concerns are sincere: a genuine belief that something important about how humans learn and reason is being bypassed, and a commitment to students that deserves to be taken seriously. But sincerity and self-interest are not mutually exclusive.
Resistance to technology has never really been about technology – it is about what technology does to existing structures of power and privilege. Those structures depend on control, and technology has a habit of loosening it.
Each transformation has been resisted most fiercely by those with most to lose. AI threatens to perform functions that have long conferred authority and status on those who perform them – and it is doing so at the very moment when institutional performance is being questioned like never before.
None of this argues against taking AI’s risks seriously, but it does argue that we need to be driven more by a sense of what we’re trying to achieve than by what we’re trying to defend (not least because the thing we’re defending is on rather shaky ground). Responses to AI within the sector – for instance, oral examinations, competency-based assessment, explicit instruction in critical reasoning – are frequently presented in opposition to the technology when in fact, they all can be facilitated rather than undermined by AI. AI’s broader potentialities must be seriously explored – the flat suggestion that the technology is antithetical to the development of critical enquiry is emotional, oversimplistic nonsense.
Professors are asking their students to trust that the struggle is worth it – that the friction of unaided thought produces something no machine can replicate. They may well be right. But a sector that has spent 15 years evading serious measurement in this area, and 500 years resisting technologies that threatened its authority, cannot demand that trust on faith alone.
The critical thinking stance is available to higher education, but it has to be earned – and not by pushing technology off a cliff.
Ian Richardson is a faculty member and director of executive education at Stockholm Business School at Stockholm University. He is co-founder of the national Swedish programme AI for Executives, which seeks to drive board-level understanding and organisational adoption of AI across industries and sectors
Rather than resisted by those with mot to use another view is that the “transformation” have been most resisted by those with the greatest understanding of what is at stake. Deeply disappointing to read another advertisement masquerading as an article. If the critical thinking stand has to be earned perhaps the author could be hoist on their own petard.
#2 Submitted by oliver…. on April 15, 2026 – 7:41am
This piece is upside down. Universities are now the only source of critical thinking really, and new tech seems to be now linked to oligarchy and authoritarianism. Students and academics are right to distrust it.
#3 Submitted by m.o…. on April 15, 2026 – 10:04am
The best students strive to develop critical thinking and this is evident in their contributions to discussion, oral presentations, in dissertation supervision meetings and written work. Such students tend to be wary of AI and are are able to justify their distrust of it. Importantly, the student’s critical thinking is consistent and can be tested at any time including via impromptu questioning about a text or their own work. They are a joy to teach. AI cannot beat this.
#4 Submitted by t…. on April 15, 2026 – 2:40pm
“He is co-founder of the national Swedish programme AI for Executives” ’nuff said
#5 Submitted by … on April 15, 2026 – 3:55pm
In fairness, just because he has a role to perform, does not mean he does not believe in the values of that role. People who strongly believe in EDI for example, often take up roles in that sector, people who believe in education, become teachers.
#6 Submitted by tom…. on April 23, 2026 – 3:49am
Fair critique but what I feel is missed is that AI is not just another technological innovation. Word processing is a replacement technology, not a disrupting technology as AI is.
#7 Submitted by mlarsen… on April 24, 2026 – 1:00am
Those joining the unconstrained AI fan club seem to have lost sight of the purpose of higher education. Although there’s no doubt students will use AI professionally, I believe we have a moral and ethical obligation to ensure they retain the critical thinking and communication skills to productively participate in society and the economy. Redefining learning to match the products released by Silicon Valley is the very definition of cognitive surrender
Trouble at Mill with our Sans Culottes (sans-culottes meaning “without knee breeches” -the radical and militant working-class people of late 18th-century France. As the driving force of the French Revolution, they distinguished themselves from the wealthy elite by wearing long trousers instead of the fashionable, aristocratic silk knee breeches (culottes)).
April 20, 2009, during an address to the State Library of South Australia in Adelaide. [1]
A two-speed future?
We set to work, we announced a plan, we said we were going to have a National Broadband Network, we said we’d invest up to $43 billion, we actually believe this is the infrastructure of the 21st century, just as railways, roads and the rest, telegraph, were in the 19th century and in the 20th century..
The challenge of managing two-speed economies both nationally and at a global level is to find a compromise..
This is an important investment for the future, from which each of the businesses represented in this room will benefit enormously, in ways which the economy at large hasn’t by and large thought through yet. New ways of doing business, new ways in which you can actually sell products across the tyranny of distance which has so far haunted so much of our small business community, or those which are geographically isolated from major markets both here and abroad. This is a fantastic innovation. Also for the way in which Government does business in delivering basic and efficient services and saving public finance, for example in simply the ability to transfer electronically and at speed, patient controlled electronic health records..
A holistic approach, looking at supply and demand both on a local and national scale, and in terms of interconnected economies, will always be necessary for those making decisions at the level of economic policy..
The aim must be to stimulate growth in areas facing economic slowdown whilst trying to avoid over inflation during an unexpected resource boom. This requires a dynamic approach, and one that must be fine-tuned constantly..
This article was originally published 9th June 2017 by ICAS. You can read the article and see the full edition here.
NEWS
In June 2026, Anna’s new Quarterly Essay ‘The God we Made: The Threat and Promise of Artificial Intelligence’ is released..
Prime Minister Speech to the Business Council of Australia Canberra 22 June 2010..
This is a turbo-charging piece of infrastructure which this Government has brought about and is important because unless we have infrastructure at global standards, unless we have skills at global standards, we will not have productivity growth at global standards..
The Cartesian psycho-babblers..
Sweden’s contribution to Age of Romance raison d’etat Philosophy (Warrior-prince European adventurer scientist explorer poet & ‘maiden-deflowerer’ psychopathology 1492 – 1509 to the beginning of the 21st century of the common era noted to have been Rene Descartes contracting pneumonia and obligingly dying and at this precious moment in Ten-thousand years of humanity organised in highly soil-and-garden-management productive FOOD-SECURE lands with recognisably representative citizen-participatory pre liberal-democratic central administrations I’ve momentarily lost track & sign & aegis – my goat-skin, my kabarlic masonic or Royal & Ancient Order of Mental Juvenile Bidden Buffaloes Goat-skin – my Kingdom for my goat’s-kin, man – of the @Substack Cartesian Randite male-ego youkneeverse crappola contributor here but am sure we’ll catch up ..
Lastly Metaphysics.. around 1400. Genoa perhaps. A Jewish dude.
It occurred to me when in a virtual exile from madmen and politicians in my own country in 1999 – having taken one book with me when i fled my home city early in May the year before, Ernest Becker deceased’s Birth & Death of Meaning, a fairly lame but valid jumping-off point for a study now a 28 year neurocognitive health and post post Socratic thematics logic tour de force and intellectual triumph for all humanity and immediate reform of education at ALL ages & stages of Mental Development (((for that is patently now the only proper sane coherent and comprehensive study not of Man or ANY other stilted 180° off-course (the distances & time vexation of say 1905), -direction (quantum nextness, in everyday language Futures) or -purpose ((Governments everywhere MUST WITH THE UTMOST URGENCY disconfuse, discombobulate & DISCONFLATE cause & effect (∴∵ : ∵∴) and so deactivate the Illichian global civil society AI catastrophe))) that took me to mentally grasp myself that commonly Left cerebral QUADRI-sphere thought IS unselfconscious task execution MICRO (behavioural) thought-action RECALL; BUT WAIT, ye psychically embattled AND at most moments clear-thinking Hegel-Stalin line of clahncking binary relations of stuff ((material objects or depersonalised if not commodified -as-objects-of-trade, CIVIL RIGHTS bereft – if NOT indeed violated-trafficked-enslaved-killed-commodotised and HUMAN Rights bereft)) theoreticians and like us all of course wanting to in the ontos-telos instant partnership say 0.1 seconds to 36 hours (do, be and) become theorematicians THAT BEING TRUE the commonly RHS CQ is a comprehensively alert Other-, social group-, societally AND environmentally responsive cultural-ecological conceptualiser rememberer and bear with ‘’me” yet one futher moment a repository some 2,350 years of recent human history gave e the name Plato’s Race-memory, notionally singular thinking, contemplative, hesitant, ideational DEFINITIONALLY SELF CONSCIOUS operations macro metaphysical by definition.
I discovered the MM FIRST logic THEN various branches maths LAST metaphysics some 7yrs ago and the “9th C Baghdad algebraᵛ trope say 37yrs back..
Maybe thriving is what emerges when relationships, communities, institutions, cultures, and environments become life-giving enough for human beings to flourish.
And honestly?
The more I study psychology, systems theory, complexity, neurodiversity, social change, and human development, the more I find myself arriving at a surprisingly ancient conclusion:
The individual was never the whole story.
The ecosystem was.
I’m pretty sure my Indigenous ancestors would be looking at our obsession with individual self-actualization and quietly saying:
“Well there’s your problem.”
Because they understood something modern Western culture keeps forgetting.
You don’t heal apart from the ecosystem.
You heal within it.
You don’t belong apart from the ecosystem.
You belong within it.
You don’t thrive apart from the ecosystem.
You thrive within it.
The river matters.
The soil matters.
The community matters.
The relationships matter.
The stories matter.
The ecosystem matters.
Maybe thriving was never a pyramid.
Maybe thriving was always a living system.
And maybe the future of human flourishing isn’t waiting for us at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy.
Maybe it’s waiting for us to remember that we were never standing outside the web of life in the first place.
Edina Monsoon (Saunders) is the middle-aged owner of a failing PR firm in London’s Holland Parkneighbourhood. Her best friend is Patsy Stone (Lumley), an ageing former fashion model who holds a sinecureposition at a top British magazine. The two women use their considerable financial resources to indulge in cigarettes, alcohol (most notably Bollinger Champagne) and recreational drugs and to chase the latest fads in an attempt to maintain their youth and recapture their glory days as Modsin swinging London. The partnership is driven mainly by Patsy, who is both co-dependent and an enabler to Edina.
Their lifestyle inevitably leads to various personal crises, which are invariably resolved by Edina’s daughter, Saffron Monsoon (Sawalha), whose constant involvement in their exploits has left her increasingly bitter and cynical. Edina’s unnamed mother (Whitfield) visits the Monsoon home frequently to keep Saffron company, help with chores and, quite often, taking Edina’s possessions to sell at off car boot sales. The relationship between Edina and mother is strained, as they disagree on virtually everything and are rarely alone together, a relationship with which they are both keen to antagonise each other. Meanwhile, Edina’s affairs are handled, usually very badly, by Bubble (Horrocks), an incompetent, immature and neurotic personal assistant, whose antics frequently lead to further complications for Edina’s business and personal life.
How will you go on with your day after hearing that a father in Gaza, trapped beneath the rubble, begged rescuers not to save him?
Not because he had lost the will to live, but because he could hear the fading breaths of his daughters beneath the debris.
Their tiny hands were holding onto his in the darkness, as if calling for him one last time. He was the father who had always been their safe haven, yet this time he was powerless to pull them from the earth and shattered concrete.
Only his head was visible above the wreckage. He looked into the eyes of the rescue workers with a gaze exhausted by fear and helplessness and said:
“Leave me… my daughters are here. I don’t want to come out alone.”
What heart can bear such a scene? What language can truly describe a father’s agony as he realises he is losing his daughters one by one, while still holding their hands until they grow cold-unable to save them, unable to offer even one final embrace?
How will your day continue after knowing this story? How will you sit at your table in peace, or laugh at something trivial, knowing that a father’s last wish was not to survive alone?
And the question that continues to haunt the human conscience remains:
How much pain must the world witness before it hears the cry of a single father in Gaza?
Substack corespomdent ERALD KOLASI per cortesia (the Monetarism-as-fake-ecosystem global public educator)
“I was building a sandcastle with my daughter yesterday when I realized that I was spending a lot of my time putting up moats, walls, and other defensive structures to protect the castle against the encroaching tide. Eventually the tide won and flooded our castle, though at least the castle lasted for a couple of hours or so.
“Civilization faces a similar conundrum in this millennium, as we are constantly battling against the natural forces of entropy that keep trying to degrade what we have built. We have unleashed or turbocharged many of these forces ourselves, like accelerating global warming, extreme floods and droughts, ocean acidification, excess eutrophication and nutrient loading, dead zones, topsoil erosion, aquifer depletion, mass extinction, biodiversity losses, and a million others. There comes a point when we must realize that aiming for resilience while simultaneously pushing the biosphere towards critical ecological tipping points is a losing strategy. Building more dams, dykes, levees, sewers, storm drains, elevated foundations, and wind-resistant roofs can delay our reckoning, but if we cannot stabilize the biosphere and halt its march towards an ultra-chaotic state, then our fate is just as sealed as that of my tiny sandcastle.”
A READER’S RESPONSE ➤
“We can exist in a universe of entropy because we are an organizing force. Our constant battle is not with nature, it is with our own proclivity of self- destruction. What we’re fighting against are our own best interests.”
ERALD KOLASI RESPONDS ➤
“Shift [the scale] of analysis and we are not an organizing force. Yes we build roads, railways, and skyscrapers, but all of that local order and organization comes at the expense of creating greater chaos and disorder throughout the [troposphere]. The two are directly related, and this is something I discussed in my book as well. The more complex our civilization becomes, the more waste and pollution it dumps and releases into the [troposphere], triggering thermodynamic instability and all the ecological problems we’re now witnessing.”
READERS’ NOTE re misleading terms in common usage such as Planetary-biosphere ➤
…“as” published 19 hours ago on Jack Dorsey CEO’s @XComms
BILLIONAIRE MONKEYS READERS ARE of course MOST AND EVER WELCOME to read the XComms Global | Cut Through the Noise: Get Your Employees’ Undivided Attention with XComms @greeneconomyact where global macro (metaphysical) Platonic Race-memory is ever driven instantly or instantaneously (in ‘high-performance’ athletic activity) by micro quanta thought & action .. newsmedia corporations romantically call those Lived-experience and the incomprehion per DISSEQUENCED (confused ordering of THOUGHTS & ACTION), conflating or mentally reversing CAUSE & EFFECT or Falsely-equivalenced/ solecistic, inane, ‘bad’ METAPHOR or SIMILE rhetoric and sloganeering) ‘re-matricisiing’ or cerebrally reorganising as personal knowledge & ‘memory-bank’ – the Plato RACE MEMORY construct is definitional here – failed RECALL from toddlerhood through death – crudely diagnosed as Alzheimers Disease when in fact a lifelitme’s unlearning socio-cultural re-engineering to serve per the agencies and authorities of Raison-d’etat Neoliberalism notably Education, Arts, Culture, Sciences & Technology the fiscal & colonising interests of the multi $100 billion propertied elites, or Marxian class..
John, Australia
The Rule of Just Law confronted by Gangster Libertarianism circa 2000 Common Era
Great Conference 2026 adjacent Bismarckian 1870 🇫🇷-🇩🇪 Raison-d’ètat Nationhood-gate
1. Jensen Huang
“Huang is the latest business leader to weigh in on how AI could reshape education and work.
“The Nvidia chief pointed to journalism, storytelling, the arts, and design as examples of fields that will remain valuable even as AI becomes more powerful. He pointed out the best interviewers are not just well prepared, but able to stay present, listen closely, and respond dynamically in the moment.
” ‘The ability to tell a story for an audience will remain just as important in the future as it is today,’ Huang said.
“The Nvidia [@NVIDIA] chief also referenced the Japanese concept of “wabi-sabi,” or the beauty of imperfection, suggesting that uniquely human qualities could become even more prized in an AI-saturated world.
” ‘Whatever you decide is your passion, the only one thing that you have to do is to make sure that you ask yourself: How can AI help elevate my learning, my craft, my purpose?’ he said.
2. Peter Diamandis
“Earlier this month, futurist and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis told Business Insider that kids will need qualities such as curiosity, purpose, and adaptability to succeed in the AI era.
3. Scott Galloway
“Meanwhile, entrepreneur and entrepreneur-turned-professor Scott Galloway said on ‘The Diary of a CEO’ podcast that parents should focus on helping children develop durable human skills such as storytelling, communication, and relationship-building.
4. John Blundell, Geo-community goes to Troposphere & vice-versa Economics theoretical 1956, theoremic 1995, Thematics QR Logic, overhaul of all neurocognitive health services & education services @ all levels & democraphic cohorts ‘Toddler to Masters-degree’ (25k universities), the internet involution, intelligent proactive Global-heating management
Our Street with a Fun-name
J
Fri AM Chukchi-Beijing-East-ntrctc. Trisphere Lngtdnl Time/ origin msn.com minus ‘36’ hrs
🥸🐒⌨️🥸🐒⌨️🥸🐒⌨️🥸🐒⌨️
¹Burning Man is held in Black Rock City, a temporary metropolis constructed annually in the Black Rock Desert of northwestern Nevada, USA. The site is a dry lake bed (playa) located about 100 miles (160 km) north-northeast of Reno. [1, 2, 3]
²Huang echoed those themes, arguing that while AI would automate parts of many jobs, it would also push people toward higher-level work requiring judgment and creativity. ‘A job is like a basket of tasks,’ he told CNA. ‘Many of those tasks will be automated. And my sense is that as a result of automation, we can focus on the harder parts of our work. Huang also pushed back on concerns that widespread AI use could make people less intelligent or lazier thinkers. Drawing comparisons to the rise of personal computers, the internet, and smartphones, Huang argued that previous waves of technology increased human ambition rather than diminishing it. ‘Do we find ourselves busier or less busy? I think the answer is we found ourselves busier,’ Huang said.
Billionaire-🙈🙊🙉🐒s with Olivettis 