The AI-to-AI Economy

By Abe Greenwald

A friend of mine recently got laid off from his job at a large firm. Wasting no time, he immediately started hunting down and applying for available positions. The thing was, almost all his initial application letters were swiftly rejected. “I realized I was dealing with AI, not humans,” he told me. The vast majority of big corporations screen job applications with AI platforms trained to search for specific phrases that indicate a candidate’s desirability or undesirability. It’s up to the AI to put you through to the next phase or give you the thumbs down.

So my friend changed his approach, and he started getting interviews. “What did you do differently?” I asked. The answer: “Every application is now written by AI on my end before I send it.”

I was chilled by the notion of my highly capable friend having to employ one lifeless machine to speak to another on his behalf in hopes of getting a foot in the door. I then learned that everyone does it that way now. 

Dystopias, real and imagined, aren’t just cold, nightmarish places. And they’re not shaped merely by evil ideas. The most overlooked aspect of dystopian worlds is the dumbness that settles at their core, the incredible stupidity of the schemes that people are roped into. 

During Mao’s Great Leap Forward, for example, peasants were encouraged to kill sparrows because sparrows ate valuable grain. But they also ate insects, so their ensuing disappearance led to agricultural disaster. Soviet factories were rewarded for meeting production quotas determined by either weight or quantity of output. So you’d wind up with, say, nail factories that achieved quotas by producing either enormous or minuscule nails—both varieties unusable. 

In our present AI-driven hiring gauntlet we see the characteristic moron logic of dystopias pushing smart people into an idiotic scheme. First there are the talented individuals like my friend. He can, doubtless, write a brilliant application letter but now must suffer the indignity of asking a machine to satisfy the prompts of another machine. 

The greater share of idiocy, however, falls on the employers. By utilizing AI to screen applicants according to oversimplified criteria, they’re not only overlooking outstanding talents, but they’re also encouraging everyone to go the AI route. Even the worst applicant now understands that only AI knows what AI wants, which means there’s no telling how many unusable human nails are getting through to the next phase of the process.

It's no secret that the AI realm is potentially dystopian in varied ways: from the threat it poses to entire professions to the (fanciful) possibility of it going rogue and annihilating us all. But I didn’t recognize until now that it also met this particular dystopian qualification: compelling human adherence to an overarching but plainly asinine structure. In some ways, this is the creepiest thing about it. You must satisfy the system whether or not it makes sense. And that’s what gave me chills because, historically speaking, that’s the stuff of shared nightmares. 

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.