CONCEPT
The Debt of Unlimited Potential
The subjective obligation generated when AI expands productive capability — the gap between what one could produce and what one does produce experienced as debt owed to one's own unrealized capacity.
AI's expansion of productive capability generates a structural analog to financial indebtedness operating not through money but through capability. If a tool enables production at twenty times the previous rate, and the worker chooses to produce at only ten, the unrealized potential is experienced as debt — owed to the employer, the career, and most insidiously to the self, because the enterprise of the self treats unrealized potential as the cardinal failure. Unlike financial debt, which has defined amounts and repayment schedules, the debt of unlimited potential has no bounds. Each capability expansion grows the debt faster than any individual can service it, producing the guilt and inability to stop that pervade AI-intensified immaterial labor.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Lazzarato's analysis of the indebted man in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis identified debt's most important product not as financial instruments but as a specific form of subjectivity: the figure who organizes