 The other day, on my way home after work, I went to my nearest grocery store spa and, when I entered, I saw one of the employees sweeping the floor with a broom. How strange I thought that in an era where robot vacuum cleaners are commonplace, this man he is still using a broom, a technology that is many millennia old. But the economic rationale for spa not to use robotic vacuum cleaners is clear. They are already paying this employee, if he is able to do the sweeping when he is not busy at the till, spa is able to have the sweeping done at no extra cost. Whereas, if they had a robot vacuum cleaner, they would have had to have purchased it, and this purchase of fixed capital would not lead to any reduction in their wage bill. Thus, economically speaking the robot vacuum cleaner is irrational and sticking with the broom is rational. The example I witnessed is a clear case of how capitalism fetters the development of the productive forces and forces people to do work that is technologically speaking unnecessary. But, if capitalism in this way retards technological development and keeps workers needlessly busy, why is there so much anxiety about these days regarding AI and automation? Well, there are times when replacing labor with machinery is economically rational for the capitalist. In particular, this is the case whenever wages are rising. In these circumstances it becomes advantageous to buy the robot vacuum, if by doing so one can reduce the hours of the store clerk. At spa one would probably see robot vacuum cleaners most likely introduced together with self-checkout machines. They seem to be the only Dublin grocery store to still lack such machines. As Mark said, it would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working-class revolt. Every technological innovation at least since the power loom has to skill labor, reduced wages, and put many people out of work. How can this process still result in a media storm and a moral panic? My own hypothesis is that chat GPT and other AI technology target the intelligentsia for diskilling and throwing out on the street. The intelligentsia largely overlaps with the commentariat and thus we get to hear much more griping than we do when it is more traditionally working-class jobs that are diskilled or replaced. For my part, I think that the proletarianization of the intelligentsia is an excellent thing because it will incentivize the intelligentsia to join in the class struggle on the side of the proletariat rather than sticking to their day job as apologist for the bourgeoisie.