According to MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals”. Author of Team Human, Survival of the Richest, and Life Inc., he is a documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age.

Joining us on our inaugural CHATROG podcast, Douglas contends that artificial intelligence, much like earlier technological innovations, does not actually remove the need for human labour but instead conceals and redistributes it, a phenomenon he describes as the “dumbwaiter effect.”

This term refers to how inventions once promoted as eliminating arduous work—in the original case, slave labour—merely rendered it invisible to those who benefited from it. In the AI era, tasks such as data tagging, resource extraction, and energy supply are pushed out of sight, often onto poorly paid and socially marginalised workers across the globe. This creates a false perception of automation as clean and independent, when in reality it is underpinned by substantial human effort in hidden and exploitative conditions.

Douglas further stresses that AI tends not to replace work entirely but instead redistributes it while simultaneously degrading and deskilling roles, eroding the value of expert human contribution.

In parallel, the integration of algorithms into decision-making processes—from court sentencing to product recommendations—enables individuals, corporations, and governments to deflect moral and legal accountability. By placing responsibility on the machine, society increases its ethical distance from the real-world consequences of such decisions, eroding human engagement with difficult truths and sending moral responsibility into what Rushkoff implies is a bureaucratic void. This results in a dangerous social tendency to trust opaque systems over human judgment, even when human oversight is essential.

You can listen to all the episodes of the CHATROG podcast here