AI companies seem intent on impressing us with their products’ capabilities, whether that’s writing arias or hacking into other companies despite being told not to. There is AI in all our creative software tools – we can’t seem to get away from it.

No longer struggle to learn an instrument – AI can create the songs for you! It can write that novel you charmingly thought you had in you! It can also let you fire all your employees and replace them with tireless, always-healthy slaves at a fraction of their price. I’m sure the old slaves humans will find something else to do. Except we’ve encouraged them to automate their hobbies and relationships as well.

AI is being used to solve maths problems – theorems unresolved for decades are finally proven or disproven at the click of a button. Will mathematicians become redundant? If they do, why would AI continue to be used to work on these theorems? Who would want them to if there are now no mathematicians. The AI companies certainly have no motivation to do so – it was little more than advertising propaganda.

The issue is widespread: once we’ve automated all the humans out of a given loop, who would want or need AI to keep doing those tasks? If AI automates all work, we won’t need it to make our slide decks for business meetings. If AI takes over analysing the images from the James Webb Space Telescope, there’ll be no one able to care about the results.

AI will make itself redundant if it keeps trying to automate away so much work that there’s no one who needs that work doing.