what happens when we hollow out work?

Inward despair and outward rebellion, people aren’t just going to take automation quietly

I’m Lawrence. a pleasure. I invest in computing hardware, AI and cryptography. If you are trying to make the world better for my children @ lawrence@lunar.vc.

btw, im on the train rn on route to paris, email me to meet. you pay for coffee.

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claude tldr: “The text covers several themes:

1. The author's anxiety about AI advancement

2. Concerns about job displacement due to AI

3. Historical parallels with the Luddite movement

4. Predictions about social unrest as AI displaces knowledge workers

5. A call for new visions of meaning and purpose in a post-work society

The writing style is informal, funny, personal, and somewhat stream-of-consciousness (editors note: lol), with references to current technology trends (Claude MCP), historical labor movements, and cultural touchpoints like Fight Club.”

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As part of my breakdown in the face of the coming onslaught of AI, I can’t stop thinking about what it means to be the weavers now

I never started this newsletter to be medium for this breakdown. It started with optical computers, as it always should, all photons and hope. Neuromorphic chips, all neurons and consciousness. An emerging technology newsletter for the startup community. Value Chains! Market Maps! Such fun.

But also obviously terrible and sad, yes? So so boring. What are we all doing out here? So hard pivot, stay with me. Things are moving much faster now. Maybe in the past sans kids I might have played around with Claude MCP a few weeks ago. Really *felt* the AGI. Maybe I would have been touching the frontier as it quickly descended over the event horizon. Instead as it is, I’m a few weeks late. Barely seeing the frontier as it reaches espace velocity. In this economy and in this fast takeoff environment, that’s all it takes to be a loser.

Yes, Manus is a Claude wrapper with glue and sticky tape. Lies are around the world before the truth gets its shoes on and all that. But it’s happening. Don’t let the hype fool you. It’s still happening even if a demo fools you once. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me thrice, shame. As the saying goes.

Maybe I will offer up my State of Optical Computing or my musings on thermodynamic computers soon. How neural network-based AI is probabilistic not deterministic and what that means for next-gen hardware. How our human desire to reduce uncertainty has shaped the design of our computers. We demand certainty from our computers at the cost of all the power. But maybe all the power is all it takes? But that’s for another time. A slower time. A time not on an exponential curve.

loss and grief

Today I’m mainly thinking about loss. Loss and grief; and what people will do when they are losing. I’m not a futurist, but it doesn’t take a VC to realise that people are not just going to take what’s coming to them. As I said, people will not just go quitely into the good night. Andrew Tate is what happens when men think they are losing power to women. Brexit, Trump, AfD and the far right are what happens when people feel powerless. We used to be masters of our destiny. We used to be important. We used to make things. Kids used to respect their elders. We used to all go down the mines together. We had community, we had religion, we looked out for each other. We used to leave our front doors unlocked. Loss and grief wrapped up a nostalgia.

And now, what happens when millions of knowledge workers lose power to Silicon and Sam? (“Silicon Sam"?)

AI and automation, augmentation, re-skilling, 10% economic growth. It’s all so abstract, so logical and intellectual. Because the only people that understand models and scaling laws are a select few Demi-gods in the labs. No-one in the real world thinks about probabilities, exponentials and updating priors. New scaling laws. Inference-time compute. We saw from Covid; nobody think about the future until it hits them in the face. And even then.

So we have a wave of automation coming and people are too busy to notice. People are busy on the school run. Caring for old parents. Paying the heating bill. Real now problems, not maybe tomorrow problems.

So it’s left to the engineers and researchers to sketch out visions of the future. And to be fair, Dario and Jack are very good at it. But here I am, on the dog walk walking past a primary schools and asking: what will these kids do? But more than that: what do they feel about their future?

Last week I suggested automation would creep up in the shape of performative work. More stand ups. More check-ins. More busywork protected by Governments and Trade Unions. Accountants, Lawyers and Doctors pressing the final button. The last sham of control. The quiet despair. Mortgages will be paid by our collective loss of meaning. Some will turn their pain inwards. But others won’t.

some will fight

You think the online far-right will allow themselves to be replaced by some jumped-up bit of foreign silicon? Because they won’t. We joke of the Luddites as a term of ridicule. The capitalists won (lol I’m an VC). But the Luddites were just the clearest example of destructive revolt against job displacement.

When mass job losses hit communities, the response often splits two ways: inward collapse or outward rebellion. In mining towns across Appalachia, the first path manifested as an epidemic of "deaths of despair" - suicide rates in former coal counties soared. The Sacklers got rich. JD wrote a good book. This wasn't mere addiction but a form of slow-motion self-destruction.

The more explosive path emerges when rage turns outward. History gives us plenty of examples. During the Herrin Massacre of 1922 in Illinois, miners murdered 19 mine guards. The Ludlow Massacre of 1914 against the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron was a ten-day guerrilla war with over 50 dead. More recently, France had violent protests against job cuts at Goodyear and Continental tire factories in 2009, where executives were held hostage by workers and manufacturing equipment was destroyed. And so on and so forth.

And what of the Luddites. Well this insurrection was put down after the British government eventually deployed more soldiers than they had fighting Napoleon in the Peninsular War. So was pretty big then.

The online right and populists haven’t taken up this fight yet. They are busy fighting women, migrants and elites. But they will. It will soon become clear, even to this corner of the Internet, that their loss of power is coming from computers not migrants. It always was.

silicon saboteur #starvethesilicon

Expect to hear the term digital-terrorism quite soon. I’m no influencer but if I wanted to coin a meme, I would go for “silicon saboteur”, “datacentre destroyer”. “neo-Luddites”. I can go all night. But as I say, I’m no influencer.

This isn’t supposed to be a joke. This is serious business, it’s just I’m not a serious guy. These are not predictions I want to make, but like divination, the spirits come to me, I can’t call them. Datacentres are harder to destroy than looms, but also, not that hard right? If I were playing 3 dimensional chess here, I would be opposing the building of nuclear power plants. Say that it’s bad for the environment or unsafe or whatever publically. But really it’s to starve the silicon. Actually, that’s the meme. You’ve still got it.

This wave of automation will not lead to mass automation as I’ve argued. A more realistic scenario is mass underemployment. This is tricky as it won’t show up in the unemployment numbers. It won’t show up with mass job losses in the media. It’s silent.

But my fear is that as Mike Skinner says, “Geezers need excitement, if there lives don’t provide it, they incite violence, common sense, simple common sense”. The far right diagnosis is correct: people, especially younger people and white men, feel powerless and disillusioned. Obviously women and non-white men have felt this for longer, but now white men feel it, it results in wars and we all suffer the consequences. And the far right movement is first and foremost an online movement. It started in the dark corners or 4chan and has made its way to X and Facebook. As white collar workers do less and less “work” and feel ever more powerless; fingers will finally be correctly pointed.

Inward collapse and outward rebellion. Performative work and digital terrorism. If this sounds familiar it’s because Chuck Palahniuk got there first with Fight Club. Nearly two decades ago he tackled the themes of masculinity in crisis, identity and anarchism. If anything, he was two decades early. In the book Tyler Durden blows up the banks. In this story it will be the datacentres.

visions of a sunny future

We need to grip this early, not just to protect the datacentres. But to address the deepening loss of agency and powerlessness. We need a positive vision of the future. We cannot talk in abstractions and 10% GDP growth. People were told globalisation would make them richer. And it didn’t feel like it. This will be someone else’s 10% economic growth.

The wrong answer is UBI. The wrong answer is to protect jobs. Obviously smashing up the looms won’t work. We need to untether our identity and sense of self from the labour we sell. You are not an accountant Adam. You are a father, a son, a husband, and a member of your community. The capitalists really did a job on us.

Next week, imma write about what that might look like. it’s prolly community, family and care. It's finding meaning in the connections we build, not the output we produce. It's reclaiming time for creativity, for presence, for the slow and necessary work of tending to relationships. We need to tell the story of why AI automating jobs is a good thing, not a thing to fight.

It’s not going to be electricity, chips or data that bottlenecks AI. It will be a lack of positive visions of the future. How humans can flourish in an age of AI.

But I can’t be your Ned Ludd, I’ve got a AI agent value chain analysis to write…