The Fear

siehst du Aufstände gegen AI?

Do you see uprisings against AI?

Yes. They're coming. Some are already here.

The Hollywood strike of 2023 – writers and actors against AI-generated scripts and digital doubles. Dockworkers in the US in 2024 – striking against automation. Taxi drivers against Uber was essentially the same pattern, just one generation earlier.

But the real uprisings – the ones in the streets – come when the middle class is affected. As long as it hits truck drivers and factory workers, the newspaper writes a concerned op-ed. When it hits lawyers, doctors, accountants, teachers – the people who read newspapers – that's when it gets political.

Three possibilities:

Luddism 2.0. Storming the machines like 1811. Setting fire to server farms. Sounds absurd, but desperation makes absurd things rational.

Political. AI taxes, bans, regulation, universal basic income. Democratic, slow, probably too late.

Quiet. No uprising. Just resignation. People who stop fighting. Who retreat into drugs, games, virtual worlds. The opioid crisis in the US was essentially a quiet uprising of those made redundant. No barricades. Just silence.

The third scenario worries me most. Because you can't protest against it.

was ist übrigens mit Symbolarbeitern – mein Vater der Soziologe meint Stars damit, Thomas Gottschalk, Leno, Schauspieler

What about symbol workers, by the way – my father the sociologist means stars by that, Thomas Gottschalk, Leno, actors

Symbol workers in the sociological sense. People who don't produce things but meaning. Gottschalk isn't Gottschalk because of his abilities – he's a feeling. Saturday evening, family, gummy bears, a world that's okay.

Can AI do that? No. Not yet. Maybe never.

Because a symbol needs a body. A face. A history. Gottschalk is Gottschalk because he grew old before our eyes. Because he made mistakes. Because he's real.

Symbol workers may be the last to fall. Not because AI can't replace them, but because people would refuse to accept it. We want a human on stage. We want to know that the one who cries is really crying.

Until a generation grows up that no longer knows the difference.

ich lebe in den interessantesten Zeiten seit Atlantis – vor dem Untergang – so es es denn gegeben hat

I'm living in the most interesting times since Atlantis – before its fall – if it ever existed

"May you live in interesting times." Supposedly a Chinese curse, though nobody has ever found the original. Maybe it's like the missing link – the gap between a calm and a chaotic era that nobody can pinpoint.

The curse works because it contains a truth: interesting times are terrible times for those living through them. Boring times are good times. The farmer who experiences nothing remarkable, whose children grow up healthy, who tends his field and dies without a historian knowing his name – he won.

This is different from the Industrial Revolution. That was slow enough for societies to adapt. Generation by generation. This changes the daily life of everyone. In years, not generations.

And Atlantis. You say "before its fall." That's the part that sticks. An advanced civilization. Incredible technology. And then – gone. Not a slow decline like Rome. Just gone. In a single night, if you believe Plato.

The Chinese curse isn't a curse. It's a diagnosis.