Over the past few days I’ve found myself mulling the question of whether AI will destroy art and literature. Initially, I found myself comforted by a thought, articulated by Carrie Jenkins on bluesky, that since the value of art lies not simply in the product but in the process of its creation, art will survive intact. When I contemplate Van Gogh’s Starry Night, I’m not just considering a decontextualized pretty object such as an AI might produce, but something that results from human intention, contemplation and struggle and which flows from a life and its roots. So far, so good.

I was moved to think of Marx’s contrast in The Results of the Immediate Process of Production between Milton, who “produced Paradise Lost as a silkworm produces silk, as the activation of his own nature” and “the literary proletarian of Leipzig who produces books, such as compendia on political economy”. (See Capital vol 1, Penguin edition, p. 1044). The literary proletarian may be threatened by AIs, which can churn out such compendia, or perhaps boilerplate romantic fiction, but a Milton is not. But on further reflection, I think this is a mistake. Not that “Miltons” will entirely disappear but they will be oddities, isolates, like Sabato Rodia who built the Watts Towers.

The thing is, people do value products for their instrisic characteristics, divorced from the histories of the creation and creators. When people go to IKEA to buy a nice lamp or a rug, they are mostly indifferent to who has produced it: they want something that looks good, is affordable, and works. And AI can produce this, thereby depriving thousands of equivalents of the “literary proletarian” of their livelihoods. Sure, a few people might pay a premium for an Anni Albers-designed rug (and more for an original), but most will settle to adorn their home with an AI-produced knock-off at a fraction of the price.

The trouble is, that the elimination of the literary proletarians doesn’t simply leave the Miltons standing, unscathed. Mostly, art does not just emerge from a random genius popping up and producing great works but from a milieu which provides a context and an infrastructure. A network of other producers but also critics, dealers, suppliers, teachers. I believe Howard Becker writes about this in his book Art Works, but though it is on my to-read shelf, I have not yet done so. Some of those people produce output that is “art”, but since “art” is a prestige category, many others produce work that fails to rise to that level but which is merely decorative or entertaining. Many of them will have been trained in art schools or universities but have failed to make it as artists, but without them those schools will become unviable. In short, withouth the wider group of near-misses and engaged supporters it is hard to see where many artists will come from: thanks to AI they will lack a sea in which to hatch and then swim.

To all of you – a healthy, flourishing, and meaningful 2026!

To the world – I am less sure where to begin, since 2025 was, politically and morally speaking, one of the worst years since long. Let’s hope for peace, definitely. Responsible leaders with sound morals. Positive tipping points in climate action. A decline of all that crypto/post/neo/full-blown fascist crap that spread like a virus in 2025 (and before – but it seems to have accelerated in 2025). And therefore, I hope that many more people will become more like (a good chunk of) the commentariat of this blog – progressive, politically well-informed, and also asking perhaps the most urgent question at this point in history: what should we do? And what does the answer to that question imply for what I should do?

More and more of my friends are explicitly asking that question, but we are often unsure of the answer. Although I have some thoughts (in fact, I’m hoping to write a book on it), it is not self-evident. But it helps to not think about this question by oneself, but to raise and discuss it with friends, in organisations, and online. And if the answers seem overwhelming, I find that a one-hour walk with a dear person in the fields and the woods does wonders.

Also – I’m glad you are still reading us (and joining the discussions) after all these years, thanks.

I read a post on one of the social media platforms written by a professor who was sharing his experience with giving away ten percent of his income, after he signed the “Ten percent giving pledge” many years ago. In deciding what or whom to give to, those who take the ten-percent-pledge often follow the advice of Effective Altruism and typically end up making donations that aim to prevent malaria, deworm, or increase childhood vaccination rates, as well as give to animal welfare (which is a big topic among effective altruists).

It is truly admirable that someone consistently gives 10% or more of their income, especially given that most people don’t, and also given that this may, in absolute terms, be a sizeable sum (hence with a genuine opportunity cost). It is also good that people who give so generously write about it publicly. It could help shift social norms around giving. It may also help others who give generously but sometimes have doubts to feel that they belong to a broader community of those who give. It may inspire others to give more.

So I have only praise for giving so generously. But when it comes to choosing recipients, I make different choices. [click to continue…]

Having watched the film, I thought I’d get Robert Linhart’s book off the shelf and finally read it. I think I bought it in Oxford in the early 80s. To remind you, it depicts Linhart’s experience as a Maoist cadre who has chosen to get a job in a Citroen factory in Paris in order to foment “resistance”. There’s an English translation, apparently, called The Assembly-Line, long out of print.

One reason for my hesitance in reading, perhaps, is that I have quite a low opinion of Maoists, particularly Western ones, and I’m sure that Linhart had at the time all kinds of dubious opinions about the Moscow Trials or the Cultural Revolution, but there’s really none of that in the book where he comes across as a fairly generic far-leftist. Instead there’s a fascinating description by someone with real literaray talent of the human reality of mass production as it was in the 1960s and probably still is somewhere other than Europe. It aslo gives an account of the ethno-sociology of the workforce which was “multicultural” long before the rest of society meaningfully was. Possibly the best book ever written by a Maoist then.

When Linhart enters the factory it is very different to how he imagined it would be, which was an assembly line shifting in short bursts as workers performed their tasks. Instead, the line moves continuously with workers running to catch up trying do their jobs quickly so they can get ahead of the game and sneak a quick cigarette or taking too long and getting tangled up with the next section. A manager puts him in the hands of a spot welder, who makes his movements with speed, precision and grace. But when that same Arab worker hands over to Linhart the novice makes a complete mess, molten solder all over the place, and he’s a danger to others and himself with his blowtorch. In a break they get chatting and he discovers that his “trainer” is graded as an unskilled worker (despite showing consummate skill) whereas he, Linhart, has been taken on at a skilled grade. But it soon becomes clear that the assignment of workers to grades has nothing to do with the skills those grades nominally represent: blacks are at the lowest unskilled level, Arabs at the higher unskilled ones, Spanish and Portuguese at the lowest tier of “skilled” and white French people like himself a notch above that, even if they can’t actually do anything. Who says there’s no such thing as “white privilege”?

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I am at the airport in Melbourne (again). I’m sitting in the window eating one of those excellent boxes of kale, broccoli, beans, seeds, peas and a boiled egg that I am grateful are now available at airports. Next to me a father and daughter are observing the world – look at how that plane looks like a giant shark! And oooh, here come the bags!

What looked like an automated process when a Virgin Airlines robot told me my bag on the conveyer belt was heading towards the same destination as me turns out, my eyes now tell me as this adorable pair observe the world out the window, is also a matter of human labour. A human is driving all the bags to the plane.

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My last post described my attempt to generate a report on housework using Deep Research, and the way it came to a crashing halt. Over the fold, I’ve given the summary from the last version before the crash. You can read the whole report here, bearing in mind that it’s only partly done.

As I said, I chose the questions to ask and the points on which to press further. DR extracted the data (I was planning to get detail on this process before the whole thing crashed), produced graphs to my specifications and generated the first draft of the text, with a style modelled on mine.

If I were doing this to produce a report for publication, I’d initially I was about halfway there, after only a few hours of work on my part. But as with LLMs in general, I suspect the final editing would take quite a bit longer.

Still, the alternative would have been either nothing (most likely) or a half-baked blog post using not-quite-right links to the results of Google searches. So, I’m going to keep on experimenting.

Early versions of LLMs were mostly substitutes for medium-level skill. It made it easy for someone barely literate to generate an adequate business email or (in the graphics version) for a complete klutz like me to produce an obviously-AI illustration for a post (Substack expects some kind of picture)

But with Deep Research, I think there’s an amplification of general research skills. It’s ideal for topics where I have some general idea of the underlying reasoning, but am not familiar with the literature and am unaware of some important arguments

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I’ve long been interested in the topic of housework, as you can see from this CT post, which produced a long and unusually productive discussion thread [fn1]. The issue came up again in relation to the prospects for humanoid robots. It’s also at the edge of bunch of debates going on (mostly on Substack) about living standards and birth rates.

I’m also interested (like nearly everyone, one way or another) in “Artificial Intelligence” (scare quotes intentional). My current position is, broadly, that it’s what Google should have become instead of being steadily enshittified in the pursuit of advertising dollars. But I’m alert to other possibilities, including that more investment will deliver something that genuinely justifies the name AI. And I think a lot of the concerns about power and water use, the spread of AI slop and so on are either overstated or (as with deepfakes) are mostly new iterations of concerns that always arise with new IT and communications technology, and can be addressed with existing conceptual and legal tools.

With this background, I thought it would be interesting to try out ChatGPTs Deep Research (DR) on the question of what has happened to housework and why. As I may have mentioned before, I’ve trained DR on a big volume of my own writing. That produces a passable imitation of my style, and means I don’t worry about the ethical issues of plagiarising the writing style of others (of course, standard norms of citation and attribution still apply).

I decided to focus on single-person households, to abstract away from the issues of child-raising (which I want to look at separately) and the allocation of work between partners (about which there is a vast literature to which I can’t add anything new).

Everything went really well to start with. I prompted DR for time use data, then pushed further on with more detailed questions like the impact of air fryers on male cooking habits (I was given one recently and was impressed enough that I promptly bought a second). I asked for a literature search and got references to Judy Wajcman and Michael Bittman[2], both of whom I knew and a couple of people I didn’t. DR missed Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s classic More Work for Mother.

On the other hand, I wasn’t aware of Wajcman’s recent Pressed for Time and hadn’t thought about the broader issue of life administration, which DR pointed out. I gave it a more economistic take, trying to divide labour-saving innovation (electronic bill paying) from the labour costs of more digital consumption (retrieving passwords for streaming services etc).

I got DR to produce a LaTeX file, and was nearly ready to go to digital press when I noticed that the references were incomplete. At this stage, the whole process spiralled into disaster. Every draft seemed to lose more material, and to be worse written. Finally, I demanded an explanation
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I spent a good chunk of the afternoon watching l’Etabli, the film of Robert Linhart’s book (which I own but have never read). It is an arresting depiction of the brutality of the assembly-line and the racalialised hierarchies at work in the factory. The theme of the film is of a Maoist cadre from an academic and privileged background (in philosophy!) who enters the factory to foment resistance and revolution and finds that it is a lot tougher than he had perhaps imagined. But an opportunity presents itself when the Citroen management decide to make the workers toil unpaid for an extra three-quarters of an hour each day to “repay” the gains they’d made in May and June 1968. He helps to lead a strike and watches as the his new comrades are picked off by management and their goons, as immigrant workers are threatened with deportation and they are all subjected to acts of petty humiliation. A year later, we see him lecturing on Hegel at the University of Vincennes (later, I believe, dismantled by the French authorities as a hotbed of leftism).

The film is available to watch for free here (under “Drama”)

It reminded me a little of the Fourth International (Mandel version)’s policy of sending its students and white-collar workers into the “industrial working class” a decade later. Just as the industrial working class was actually disappearing from Western Europe and North America, they decided it was (as previously announced by Marxist theory) central to the struggle to overthrow capitalism. Some of my friends did end up in a car factory in Oxford, from which they were very soon fired once their identities became known. Others gave up good jobs in health and education but failing to find factory jobs ended up working in public transport. One of them I remember absolutely loved being a train driver compared the anxiety and stress of their previous school-teaching life. As for me, I was torn between my misplaced allegiance to the organisation (which in the UK at the time was the International Marxist Group then the Socialist League) and my conviction that this was all a dreadful mistake. So I took the path of least resistance and decided to carry on being a student (a postgraduate one) until the madness blew over. And so I ended up as a political philosopher in a university rather than whatever else I might have become (a lawyer, I suspect).

I heard a rumour that London IT professionals have selected the pub where they will meet when the internet goes down.

It is apocalyptic thinking, perhaps, but it also feels plausible. Though the internet feels permanent, stable and sufficiently distributed to seem impervious to target, this infrastructure that underpins our daily work and life is strikingly vulnerable. Undersea cables get damaged; phone and cable systems go down; and software is frequently corrupted or hacked.

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I’ve been seeing more and more alarmism about the idea that, on current demographic trends, the world’s population might shrink to a billion in a century or two. That distant prospect is producing lots of advocacy for policies to increase birth rates right now.

One of the big claims is that a smaller population will reduce the rate of scientific progress I’ve criticised this in the past, pointing out that billions of young people today, particularly girls, don’t get the education they need to have any serious chance of realising their potential. But it seems as if I need to repeat myself, so I will do so, trying a slightly different tack

It’s surprisingly difficult to get an estimate of the number of researchers in the world, but Google scholar gives us a rough idea. Google Scholar indexes research across all academic disciplines, including social sciences and humanities. No exact count is available, but I’ve seen an estimate that 1.5 million people have Google scholar profiles. I’d guess that this would account for at least half of all active researchers, for a total of 3 million.

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