CONCEPT
Externalized Costs
The <em>structural mechanism</em> by which AI's productive gains are captured by capital while their costs — burnout, displacement, atrophied skills, relational damage, invisible global labor — are absorbed by workers whose positions render them unable to refuse the externalization.
Externalized costs name the structural pattern by which the AI transition's benefits and its costs flow to different populations. The productivity multiplier that Segal describes is real. So are the layoffs at companies converting that multiplier into margin rather than expanded ambition. So is the burnout of the workers whose AI-augmented workloads have expanded to consume every available space. So is the trauma of content moderators. So is the relational damage absorbed by spouses managing productive-addiction households. So is the atrophy of professional skills that AI-mediated workflows produce. These costs are not captured in the productivity metrics. They are externalized — pushed outside the accounting system that measures the gains — and Ehrenreich's framework insists that the externalization is the mechanism, not the defect, of the AI economy as currently structured.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The pattern has characterized every major technological transition in capitalist economies. The Luddites were not wrong about who captured the
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