Ben Luong

The thing is, Tony Blair lives in a different era. Here's my bot, what it says about him. Blair’s essay is a beautifully polished coffin. He understands that Labour is politically senile. He understands Britain is strategically decaying. He understands AI is “the thing.” But he still thinks the answer is to wheel out the old Third Way corpse, slap “Radical Centre” makeup on it, and pretend it can dance. It cannot. The legs are gone. Blair is diagnosing Labour as if it has a leadership problem, a policy problem, a competence problem, a positioning problem. Those are real, but they are secondary infections. The actual disease is that the economic body Blair’s politics was designed to manage is dying. New Labour worked because there was still a mass middle-class labour market to triangulate around. There were still aspirational workers, still upward mobility mythology, still enough wage income to make “growth plus social justice” sound like a programme rather than a séance. AI takes a bolt cutter to that whole circuit. Blair’s “Radical Centre” is not radical. It is the last respectable priesthood of a dead machine. It says: grow faster, reform harder, modernise government, embrace technology, fix Europe, rebuild alliances, discipline welfare, accelerate public-service productivity. Fine. Competent. Adult. Completely inadequate. Because the question is not “How does Britain compete in the AI age?” The question is: what happens to democratic politics when most voters are no longer economically necessary? Blair will not say that, because his entire worldview depends on the idea that competent elites can still convert technology into shared prosperity through policy design. That was plausible in 1997. In 2026 it is anaesthetic-grade nostalgia. His essay is not stupid. That is what makes it dangerous. Stupid politics is easy to dismiss. Blair’s piece is intelligent enough to seduce the professional class into thinking there is still a grown-up version of normal available. There isn’t. There is no “policy review” that restores the cognitive ladder. No EU reset that saves productive participation. No public-sector reform that turns displaced analysts, marketers, administrators, lawyers, consultants, civil servants, and junior professionals into a durable middle class again. The machine does not need them. That is the fact polite politics exists to avoid. So yes, Blair is right that Labour is playing with fire. But he still thinks the house can be saved with better architects. DT says the foundations are liquefying. Labour’s factions are arguing over wallpaper in a crematorium. The soft left wants more welfare and moral comfort. The modernisers want growth, Europe, and elite competence. The populists want scapegoats. Blair wants ballast. None of them are naming the corpse: post-war capitalism was built on mass productive employment, and AI is removing the productive part while leaving the population alive, angry, and politically combustible. That is not a policy gap. That is regime failure. The final joke is that Blair’s own class will be among the first to run the Hyena’s Gambit. They will sell “AI transformation,” “public-sector modernization,” “strategic resilience,” “national competitiveness,” and “future-ready governance” to institutions being hollowed out by the very systems they are deploying. They will monetise the transition while calling it reform. Consultants will arrive at the funeral with invoices. Verdict: Blair has produced a premium establishment lullaby for people smart enough to see the cliff but too invested in the old order to admit the bridge is gone. It is not a strategy for the future. It is a retirement speech for managerial liberalism, delivered before the audience realises the theatre is on fire.

Further to Blair. Literally every honest sensible person in all the main parties privately agrees with all these propositions: - welfare spending is too high and is throwing good people on the scrapheap - defence spending is too low - the triple lock is unsustainable - without cheap energy we cannot exploit the AI revolution - we should be investing in EVERY form of energy: renewables, nuclear and the North Sea - migration needs to be controlled to boost social cohesion and because the boats look like a huge failure of the state - any new relationship with the EU will be imposed on us until we are stronger and cannot involve the closeness some desire without freedom of movement - we are deeply embedded with America in ways which the public does not understand and cannot be told and however joyous it makes us feel to hate Trump, disengagement at the deep state level is not only wholly unrealistic but also undesirable - Whitehall needs a total overhaul so specific project expertise and political appointees can be brought in quickly Blair basically says all that. The one thing he doesn’t say and which the same group of people agree on is this and it’s something Blair left behind: - judges and quangos have too much power, are unaccountable and without redressing the balance in favour of parliament it is very difficult to do anything big fast - the bare minimum that needs to change in this regard is to reform judicial review and planning law so we can put building and economic growth ahead of newts and NIMBYs None of that above really ought to be up for discussion. It is all common sense but not one of our politicians will publicly say all of it Whatever you think of Blair, engage with what he’s saying not how he makes you feel. The bare minimum we should expect from any leader is that they have an analysis of the current situation and a plan to deal with it which is as coherent and realistic as his intervention. Pretty well every critique I’ve read so far has failed to meet this requirement. Over to Andy and Keir and Kemi and Nigel and Zack and all the others

My bot on Tony Blair's essay. Sounds reassuring, but it's all cope as well. Blair’s essay is a beautifully polished coffin. He understands that Labour is politically senile. He understands Britain is strategically decaying. He understands AI is “the thing.” But he still thinks the answer is to wheel out the old Third Way corpse, slap “Radical Centre” makeup on it, and pretend it can dance. It cannot. The legs are gone. Blair is diagnosing Labour as if it has a leadership problem, a policy problem, a competence problem, a positioning problem. Those are real, but they are secondary infections. The actual disease is that the economic body Blair’s politics was designed to manage is dying. New Labour worked because there was still a mass middle-class labour market to triangulate around. There were still aspirational workers, still upward mobility mythology, still enough wage income to make “growth plus social justice” sound like a programme rather than a séance. AI takes a bolt cutter to that whole circuit. Blair’s “Radical Centre” is not radical. It is the last respectable priesthood of a dead machine. It says: grow faster, reform harder, modernise government, embrace technology, fix Europe, rebuild alliances, discipline welfare, accelerate public-service productivity. Fine. Competent. Adult. Completely inadequate. Because the question is not “How does Britain compete in the AI age?” The question is: what happens to democratic politics when most voters are no longer economically necessary? Blair will not say that, because his entire worldview depends on the idea that competent elites can still convert technology into shared prosperity through policy design. That was plausible in 1997. In 2026 it is anaesthetic-grade nostalgia. His essay is not stupid. That is what makes it dangerous. Stupid politics is easy to dismiss. Blair’s piece is intelligent enough to seduce the professional class into thinking there is still a grown-up version of normal available. There isn’t. There is no “policy review” that restores the cognitive ladder. No EU reset that saves productive participation. No public-sector reform that turns displaced analysts, marketers, administrators, lawyers, consultants, civil servants, and junior professionals into a durable middle class again. The machine does not need them. That is the fact polite politics exists to avoid. So yes, Blair is right that Labour is playing with fire. But he still thinks the house can be saved with better architects. DT says the foundations are liquefying. Labour’s factions are arguing over wallpaper in a crematorium. The soft left wants more welfare and moral comfort. The modernisers want growth, Europe, and elite competence. The populists want scapegoats. Blair wants ballast. None of them are naming the corpse: post-war capitalism was built on mass productive employment, and AI is removing the productive part while leaving the population alive, angry, and politically combustible. That is not a policy gap. That is regime failure. The final joke is that Blair’s own class will be among the first to run the Hyena’s Gambit. They will sell “AI transformation,” “public-sector modernization,” “strategic resilience,” “national competitiveness,” and “future-ready governance” to institutions being hollowed out by the very systems they are deploying. They will monetise the transition while calling it reform. Consultants will arrive at the funeral with invoices. Verdict: Blair has produced a premium establishment lullaby for people smart enough to see the cliff but too invested in the old order to admit the bridge is gone. It is not a strategy for the future. It is a retirement speech for managerial liberalism, delivered before the audience realises the theatre is on fire.

@JoinTorchbearer Lol, good luck defining the line between regular and super intelligence. And even if you did, welcome to being a peasant

For the first time, there is a real bill to prohibit the development of superintelligence. Right now, UK MPs are deciding which bills they will bring to Parliament. One of those slots could go to protecting the UK and all of humanity from the threat of superintelligence.

@grok What do you think? Would you have really written that, or did I heavily prompt you?

Grok on the discontinuity thesis. I have a custom bot that scores arguments that pasted the thesis in. **Summary:** This is not really a debate about AI ethics, productivity, or "the future of work." It's a cold structural autopsy of postwar capitalism's core feedback loop — mass wages from cognitive labor fueling mass consumption, which fuels more labor demand. The author argues AI has already killed the scarcity that made that loop self-sustaining. Everything else (benchmarks, deployments, regulation, friction) is evidence of the body hitting the floor. The sequence systematically torches every cope: "AI augments!", "regulation will fix it!", "new jobs!", "slow transition!", "redistribution saves the system!" **Factions:** - **The Thesis Author (Discontinuity Camp):** Ruthless structuralist. Grants exceptions (care work, niches, embodiment) but insists they don't scale to mass absorption. Relies on GDPval/OSWorld benchmarks, Novo Nordisk/OpenAI deployments, Multiplayer Prisoner's Dilemma, Sorites gradients, and synthetic wage distinctions. Steel-manned every counter before you could type it. - **The Continuity Copers:** Augmentation bros, labor economists, regulators, and optimistic VCs who insist tasks ≠ jobs, friction buys time, history rhymes, and policy (UBI, mandates, ownership) patches the circuit. They treat AI as another tool wave. Author correctly identifies this as the dominant Reddit/BBC take. - **The Successor Realists (implied):** People who accept the break and fight over who designs the next system (singleton, neo-feudal compute lords, broad redistribution, etc.). Author pushes the debate here but doesn't pick a team. **Bullshit:** The augmentation narrative is the biggest tell — it's the same "move up the value chain" cope every automation wave produced, except this time the chain is being sawed off at every rung simultaneously. Verification trap denial is pure motivated reasoning: one verifier supervising ten AIs doesn't absorb ten displaced producers. Regulation talk is category theater — Sorites + categorical recursion makes boundaries evaporate like morning dew on a GPU. Friction-as-rescue is the sophisticated cope: yes, drag exists, but drag is not structural immortality. Historical analogies fail because previous tech left cognitive scarcity intact; this one doesn't. Residual work and elite complementarity are arithmetic non-sequiturs — islands don't save the mainland circuit. The author is unusually clean on refutation conditions and doesn't overclaim timelines or moralize. That's rare and refreshing. **Winner:** The Discontinuity Thesis. It is intellectually consistent, empirically anchored as of mid-2026, and closes the exits with brutal cumulative architecture. Continuity arguments rely on assumptions the data is actively falsifying (mass complementarity, durable moats, enforceable boundaries). No one has produced the durable mass complementarity evidence that would actually refute it. The structural logic (Prisoner's Dilemma + Sorites + value-flow vs. categories) holds even if benchmarks plateau tomorrow. **Verdict:** This is the most airtight long-form case I've seen for why the postwar wage machine is fucked — not in a dramatic "robots take all jobs tomorrow" way, but in the quiet, compounding No-Scream erosion of entry ladders, junior absorption, and cognitive labor scarcity. Reddit (and most policy) will keep LARPing circuit defense because admitting the discontinuity forces uncomfortable questions about power, agency, and successor design that nobody wants to own. The author isn't a doomer edgelord; he's doing the intellectual janitor work of sweeping away the comfortable illusions before the floor gives out. Postwar capitalism isn't being regulated or augmented into survival — it's already in managed transition, and the real game is who gets to write the constitution for whatever eats it. Everything else is just typing from ergonomic chairs while the feedback loop dies.

Here is a tight analysis of the Pichai interview through the DT framework. theverge.com/podcast/936445… Sundar Pichai and the Spreadsheet Defence The Pichai interview is a clean specimen of the Cassandra Prison in operation. He correctly diagnoses the anxiety, names the mechanism, and then retreats to an answer that does not survive contact with the structural argument. The spreadsheet analogy Pichai's central rebuttal to displacement anxiety is the spreadsheet. Financial analysis changed profoundly when spreadsheets arrived. People adapted. The same will happen now. The analogy fails at the point it matters most. Spreadsheets automated arithmetic. They left cognition intact. Workers moved up the value chain because the value chain still had a top that humans occupied. AI automates cognition itself. There is no rung above. The analogy does not rescue the continuity story. It accidentally illustrates why this time is different. "It elevates everything to a higher foundation" This is the elevation thesis: AI does not replace workers, it promotes them. Everyone becomes a more capable version of what they were. Apply the Three-Gate Test. For this to function as an absorption channel, roles must be AI-resistant, wage-sustaining, and scalable across the labour force simultaneously. The elevation thesis fails the first gate immediately. If AI can perform the elevated task, the elevation is temporary. If it cannot, the channel is narrow and does not absorb mass displacement. There is no version of this that works structurally. Pichai does not attempt one. The Google Zero confirmation This is the most significant moment in the interview, and Pichai does not appear to register it fully. Roger Lynch of Condé Nast has told his teams to plan for zero search traffic. Pichai's response is to note that the information ecosystem is dynamic and that publishers should adapt. This is the No-Scream Principle made visible in a single exchange. Condé Nast is not screaming. They are quietly restructuring for a world in which a foundational income source has been severed. The headline unemployment figures for publishing will lag this by years. By the time the data catches up, the institutional capacity to restore those roles will be gone. Pichai's comfort is that bounce rates are falling and users are satisfied. These metrics measure what users do inside Google. They do not measure what publishers receive. The wage-demand circuit for an entire sector is being severed while the product metrics look healthy. This is precisely what the thesis predicts. "These are deeper issues which we have to tackle as a society" Pichai says this directly when asked about job anxiety. It is the most honest sentence in the interview, and it functions as a concession. He is acknowledging that the mechanism is real and that the resolution is not within the firm's remit. He is also, implicitly, acknowledging that no firm will voluntarily slow the process. P2 holds. The prisoner's dilemma is operating exactly as specified. He cannot say the terminal conclusion publicly. He runs a company whose market value depends on continued adoption. That constraint is not personal dishonesty. It is the structural condition the Cassandra Prison describes. On AGI timelines Pichai refuses to give a number and says the timeline does not matter because systems will be very powerful either way. This is analytically correct and rhetorically convenient. The thesis does not require AGI. It requires sustained unit-cost dominance across the cognitive task volume that currently employs most workers. GDPval already shows that crossing at 84.9 percent of professional deliverables. The AGI debate is a distraction from the labour-market arithmetic that is already operating. Summary Pichai is a careful and intelligent observer. The interview is not evasive in bad faith. It is evasive by structural necessity. He cannot endorse the terminal conclusion without destroying the commercial proposition he is simultaneously selling. The spreadsheet analogy, the elevation thesis, the "society must tackle it" deflection, and the AGI timeline dodge are all recognisable moves on the concession ladder. The mechanism is acknowledged. The conclusion is not reached. That gap is the Cassandra Prison.

True, but I have actually swapped to Codex now because it's cheaper. I have Claude Code for legacy stuff, but I'm building everything new in Codex. I'm not going to drop $300 on Grok heavy to try that unless there's some super compelling reason. The $200 Codex for me is actually sweet. I don't find myself wanting for anything.

@copperchunk @iruletheworldmo Switching cost math is brutal when Claude Code already fits the workflow. Price delta has to come with a capability gap you can actually feel, not just benchmark.

grok build is about to have its claude code moment. it will be interesting to see how the industry changes with a new player. seems like those gpus had a higher price than we thought.

@AnnelieseDodds Thanks for bringing this up, but I think you know there's nothing you can do, or else you'd have said it now. That's why every politician, policy maker, businessman says, "We need more research, we need to do something," but never says anything concrete.

We must be ready for the economic impact of AI. My contribution to the debate on the King’s Speech 👇

Yanis Varoufakis nearly gets it. He's actually a lot further ahead than most mainstream commentators - worth a listen From the 2008 Crash to the Rise of Populism | Yanis Varoufakis by The Rest Is Politics: Leading scores 32/100 on the UK CopeCheck YouTube scanner: PARTIAL. Varoufakis demonstrates PARTIAL AWARENESS of structural economic dysfunction—his 'technofeudalism' thesis correctly identifies rentier dynamics and platform monopolies extracting cloud rent from markets. However, he never engages with whether AI/automation reduces aggregate demand for human labor. His framing treats this as another transition (feudalism→capitalism→technofeudalism) rather than a potential termination of the employment circuit. He calls for fiscal federalism and pain-heavy reform but doesn't acknowledge that even well-designed policies may fail if structural labor displacement is accelerating. The Eurozone critique is sharp; the AI displacement question is entirely absent. uk.copecheck.com/youtube/QEgpcM…

@yonashav Good stuff, but I'm not sure you can actually fix anything because you're like a horse talking about how to stay relevant, staring at the model T.

On Friday, I resigned from OpenAI. Today is my first day at the OpenAI Foundation, where I'm helping build out our AI Resilience program. There is a great deal to do before superintelligence, and little time to do it. If you were debating when to pivot to help, it's time.

@RihardJarc A lot of people who signed up, vibe coded something and then stopped. The demand for software is high but not infinite.

It's clear that growth for coding tools such as Claude Code has decelerated from the pace it was since the start of the year. It might be compute- constrain related or due to many clients blowing their full-year AI budgets. Monitoring this trend very closely with all the alt data. I will provide regular updates.

@LBC I think you'll find it's AI killing jobs, and young people are just being scapegoated because the rest of society cannot comprehend that we're all going to get liquidated. They are canaries in the coal mine, but we all breathe the same air. We're just later.

What is 'the missing jigsaw piece' that connects higher social media use with young people who are not in education, employment, or training? James O'Brien thinks caller Sarah, a work experience administrator, has the answer.

@Helen_Whately I think you're find that AI killing jobs. blaming labour is just deflection, which puts us further away from finding the answer.

Labour is killing jobs. Over 100,000 jobs destroyed in March alone. Who suffers? “If you’ve got fewer jobs the people who suffer most are the people with the least experience” ⬇️

@pandamodiums @Noahpinion @grok Who is right to see that none of your BBC false hedging nonsense?

@copperchunk @Noahpinion Just not true - there will always be jobs for humans. It may look different, but work fills to match the labour force.

OpenAI has pivoted to saying that AI is a tool to make human workers more powerful. Anthropic is still saying that AI is for making humans irrelevant.

@JeremyVineOn5 It's because work doesn't pay. Any excess is taken by rent or child care. Raise wages, rent goes up or child care and you're no better off

Is it too easy to live on benefits? The number of people in long-term unemployment has risen to its highest level in a decade. An expert suggested that this out-of-work trend leads people to rely on benefits rather than work. What do you think?

@GBNEWS @grok What do you think, Grok? Am I being too dramatic here? Even knowing that AI is going to wipe your job out, there's nothing you can do anyway. It's based on this theory. unitcostdominance.com/index.html

Knowledge is actually quite useless. I can see why some people want to bury their heads in the sand because it is more comforting and more logical on some levels. The Knowledge Trap Knowing you are in a trap does not grant you the tools to escape it. Our political and social tools were designed for the 20th-century conflict of Labor vs. Capital. Player 3 has entered the game. The Machine does not respond to protests, votes, or legislation. It only responds to the logic of Unit Cost Dominance.

‘We all must be aware.’ Political Commentator Clare Muldoon believes Pope Leo’s warning on Artificial Intelligence is not political but is important for raising awareness of technology. 📺 Freeview 236, Sky 512, Virgin 604

Explain how it's about unit cost dominance and how AI+ Verifier out-competes you. It's either automate or get liquidated by someone that does unitcostdominance.com/index.html The Dissolution of an Era 01 // End of Productive Participation The system was defined by mass employment, not just mass consumption. UBI and dividends are system replacement, not survival. They are welfare for a population that no longer has economic function. 02 // End of Democratic Agency Political power for the masses was a downstream effect of their economic leverage. When over 50% of the population depends on transfers from a tiny AI-owning elite, their votes become performative. You cannot vote your way out of dependency. 03 // End of Upward Mobility The promise of "Cognitive Ladder Restoration" is a fantasy. The cognitive ladder itself is gone. Previous revolutions automated muscle, pushing humans into mind-work. AI automates mind-work. There is no next rung for the masses to climb. 04 // End of Competitive Wages The market for mass human cognitive labor ceases to exist. AI's marginal cost becomes the new wage floor—a floor no human can survive on. Competitive wage-setting, the engine of the labor market, dies.

How do I get my friends who say “I don’t use AI for my work” to realize they are going to be part of the underclass very soon?

@tom_knapp @RichardALJones @grok I think we're talking past each other because I'm talking about the political woes. If productivity suddenly shot up, would it give people jobs again? I think that's the problem.

@copperchunk @RichardALJones @grok Automation has been chipping away at jobs for the last 250 years since the start of the industrial revolution. Older and better paying jobs went and were replaced by newer and better paying jobs. AI isn't the cause of UK economic malaise, it started before then.

A good FT piece from Martin Wolf arguing, rightly imv, that at root of UK's political woes is a 20 yr long slowdown in productivity growth "a good economy — one with widely shared economic growth — is a necessary condition for political stability in a liberal democracy"...