CONCEPT
Precarity in the AI Age
The structural insecurity produced when AI-driven volatility combines with project-based employment — the projective city's signature condition extended into cognitive work.
Precarity in the AI age names the specific configuration of employment insecurity produced when AI-driven productivity gains, rapid obsolescence of specific skills, and project-based organizational forms combine. Unlike industrial precarity — which concerned unstable hours, physical danger, and inadequate wages in manual work — AI-age precarity targets knowledge workers who had previously assumed themselves insulated from such dynamics. Its signature experience is the combination of high apparent status, significant nominal income, and underlying structural vulnerability that makes long-term planning, sustained expertise development, and relational stability progressively harder to maintain.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The condition emerges from the collision of three dynamics Boltanski's framework had already diagnosed. First, the projective city's organization of work around projects rather than stable employment. Second, the metabolization of the artistic critique into a vocabulary that celebrates mobility as freedom rather than analyzing it as insecurity. Third, the specific AI dynamics — rapid skill obsolescence, rapid role creation and dissolution, rapid shifts in the distribution of valuable expertise