The real topic isn’t AI. It’s institutional metabolism.

Every organization has a way of converting people into throughput. Some do it politely, with performance reviews and dashboards. Others do it with cages and deportation paperwork. The forms vary; the function is remarkably consistent: the system keeps moving by offloading its friction onto someone else’s body, time, reputation, or future.

AI accelerates that metabolism. It expands the system’s ability to act at scale without direct contact, and therefore without direct accountability. When the harm comes, it arrives as a paperwork artifact: a “match,” a “risk score,” a “process.”

The reason her essay lingers with people, one participant mentioned it “haunted” her, is that modern harm is rarely theatrical. It’s administrative. It’s denial wrapped in procedure. It’s violence in the language of efficiency.

Every field eventually reaches a moment when one of its founding figures begins speaking in a different register. Not necessarily a different idea. A different tone.

Recently, the usability pioneer Jakob Nielsen published a long reflection on AI and the future of UX work. On the surface, it reads like a technical forecast. AI coding is accelerating. Design tools are improving. Exponential scaling will smooth out today’s weaknesses. The familiar workflow of usability engineering (i.e., manual testing, heuristic evaluation, iterative design) may soon be automated away.