The Clankers’ Paradox

24 February 2026 Generative AI

You can’t prompt-engineer your way out of a panic.

I have become—perhaps unhealthily—obsessed with the rapid cultural adoption of AI.

By that I don’t mean the technology’s capabilities, but rather the wider societal impact: In my living memory, I can’t remember something being adopted this quickly, nor do I recall it affecting such a profound behavioral change: From the flood of AI-generated messages I receive in my working life to the normalization of slop and the utter mainstreaming of the phrase “Let’s ask ChatGPT” by the people using generative AI as a search engine.

Something doesn’t smell right about the speed of adoption, the way AI gets heralded as inevitable progress, even though its results—often impressive at first sight—are riddled with errors, hallucinations, or stereotypes.¹

My dad sends me regular tweets from various attention farmers warning of huge, impending job losses. The most popular of the bunch was an X post by Matt Shumer called Something Big is Happening, which likened the disruption of AI to that of the Covid pandemic and once more projected the loss of vast swaths of white-collar jobs.

Becoming yet another middleman isn’t it

Everyone is of course free to make predictions, and it’s a winning formula for online content to predict a dark future. What irks me about this type of posts is the conclusion, since the authors’ advice tends to be largely the same: Familiarize yourself with AI tools to weather the (projected) oncoming storm.²

The implication is that by learning how to use AI and automating your own tasks, you’ll somehow escape the job cuttings—for your skills and superlative productivity will make you too important to fire. On LinkedIn I saw that mindset expressed as follows: “It’s not AI that will take your job, it’s people using AI that will”.

I think that conclusion is fundamentally misguided: If AI becomes as good as champions of the technology predict, if the savings of using AI are high enough to justify universal job cuts, there simply won’t be a market for people doing the prompting—because the very use of the technology is to enable anyone to prompt.

AI cuts out the middlemen: Writers, artists, coders, and increasingly knowledge workers of all stripes. I don’t think that making a career move to become just another type of middleman has a better future.

It’s the clanker’s paradox, if you will: A belief that the challenge posed by AI can only be solved with more AI. It’s a paradox born out of a accelerationist mindset that considers the technology’s worst effects an inevitability instead of realizing that we have a choice.

On a recent episode of HardFork, Casey Newton argued for a political solution to the projected AI crisis:

I just think that this needs to be part of our political conversation, right? Like, I think this needs to be a conversation that constituents are having with lawmakers. They need to be telling them, hey, my boss is telling me that I need to start using AI every day and that there’s a high risk that I’m about to lose my job and that maybe there’s going to be permanent unemployment in some job categories. What’s your plan for that?

Let’s make a prediction

I think that’s a correct instinct, but I’m also not sure that politicians will be able to find a solution for this problem, or that they’ll be fast enough. Instead, the only way out of the delusion that AI can replace all of us is to demonstrate that human work matters: By doing good meaningful work, and by appreciating good work when we see it. What humans produce isn’t probabilistically generated, it’s the product of real skill, experience, and intuition.

When everything turns into slop, into half-baked, good-enough AI outputs, real craft and care will start to matter again, they’ll become more valuable than ever. That’s my prediction, for what it’s worth—and it’s a hopeful one.

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