Artificial Intelligence: The Truths and Myths Behind the Platform.

La Verne, California Bridge Brigade over the 210 Freeway (published in Robert Hubbell’s “Today’s Edition” Substack newsletter, March 1, 2026).

This article continues a series of articles on the effects on us of Artificial Intelligence and its hyperscaled promotion with the profits from AI, if any, going only to the sellers of AI.

Sources cited in earlier articles here are noted with the word, “supra,” in the current citation references in the endnotes of this article.

C. AI and the Environment: More Than its “Carbon Footprint”

Data centers are already, or soon will be, capable of emitting as much CO₂ each year as somewhere between 5 million and 10 million automobiles.[i] The effects of the equivalent of 10 million more automobile emissions every year would “exacerbat[e] a climate crisis that is already spurring extreme weather disasters and rip[] apart the fabric of the American insurance market.”[ii] Much to the likely dismay of homeowners in the United States, rising homeowner’s insurance premiums have kept pace, more or less, with rising home electricity costs, providing U.S. homeowners with a double economic whammy.[iii]

D. The myth of a net loss of jobs of all kinds and descriptions

1. Sales pitch to employers

AI vendors have already made “a fundamental shift from governance to profit maximization.”[iv] AI vendors pitch their product to employers by proclaiming that AI will automate jobs now.[v]

AI apparently does not pretend to “maximize profits” by accommodating disabled workers. “Disabled corporate workers at Amazon,” for example, “have accused the company of engaging in ‘systemic discrimination’[.]”[vi]

2. AI has so far been directed at unskilled rather than skilled working positions

AI has so far been directed at unskilled workers, not, for now, at skilled workers. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology reports that AI is least disruptive in Healthcare, Energy and what MIT calls “Advanced Industries.” These industries it should be noted employ many skilled workers, such as physicians and clinical staff, as to whom healthcare executives, for example, “express no expectation” of reduced hiring to fill jobs.[vii]

In contrast, executives in the Technology and Media sectors do not expect to fill positions. Relatively unskilled positions like “customer support operations and administrative processing work” are particularly vulnerable to layoffs due to AI.[viii]

At present, generative AI is already causing a net loss of jobs, but not indiscriminately, i.e., “not through broad-based layoffs.”[ix]

E. “Replacement theory”

All that has been said about job layoffs for unskilled workers at present, as distinct from what employers might categorize as skilled workers, is a snapshot of now. The intent behind AI is to replace every worker eventually.

The present discussion, however, is about what the sellers of AI offer to employers. “And what is the main value proposition of the AI that they will be pushing? To automate labor.”[x]

They offer to lower costs by automating labor. The fewer workers on the payroll, the lower the costs. The benefits of AI do not have to be greater than that. The effectiveness of AI does not need to be great, either, so long as it is good enough to convince employers-users that imperfection “is more than made up for by its potential to lower labor costs.”[xi] Where AI is involved, its sellers emphasize a very human experience of life, perhaps ironically given that AI is manifestly not human: that perfection is not required.

Further, the push by AI vendors into every conceivable market where AI could potentially be put to use, is a part of the sales pitch “for mass automation of labor in order to produce corporate profits.”[xii]

Given that the Tech sector is pushing AI, and that it, and the Media Sector, use AI the most, perhaps the “great replacement” of labor with AI is all that they can see.[xiii]

What we can see about AI and its owners and distributors will be explored further in a future article.

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[i] Sanya Mansoor, Democratic Senators Investigate Data Centers’ Effects on Electricity Prices, The Guardian (Dec. 16, 2025) (citing a “Cornell study published last month in Nature Sustainability”),

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/16/data-centers-consumer-prices. The web address for the study published in Nature Sustainability is https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-025-01681-y.

[ii] Milman, The Guardian (Dec. 8, 2025), supra. To the same effect is Oliver Milman, How Climate Risks Are Driving Up Insurance Premiums Around the US-Visualized, The Guardian (Dec. 5, 2024), https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/05/climate-crisis-insurance-premiums.

[iii] See, e.g., Milman, The Guardian (Dec. 26, 2025) (”Meanwhile, many Americans have faced rising home electricity costs and steep increases in home insurance premiums.”), supra; Milman, The Guardian (Dec. 8, 2025), supra.

[iv] Allison Stanger, The AI Raj: How Tech Giants are Recolonizing Power, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Sept. 15, 2025), https://thebulletin.org/2025/09/the-ai-raj-how-tech-giants-are-recolonizing-power/.

[v] Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work), Substack (Oct. 27, 2025), supra.

[vi] Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Michael Sainato, Disabled Amazon Workers in Corporate Jobs Allege ‘Systemic Discrimination,’ The Guardian (June 30, 2025), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/30/disabled-amazon-workers-discrimination. The accommodations issues cited by the Amazon workers included “return-to-office mandates, ... accommodation procedures and accessibility,” and “concerns that employee decisions around accommodation were being driven by AI processes that -- one source claimed -- do not necessarily follow ADA rules.” Id.

[vii] See MIT NANDA, July 2025, at 21-22, supra.

[viii] Id. at 21.

[ix] Id.

[x] Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work), Substack (Oct. 27, 2025), supra.

[xi] Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work), Substack (Oct. 27, 2025), supra.

[xii] Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work), Substack (Oct. 27, 2025), supra.

[xiii] See MIT NANDA, July 2025, supra, at 4.