Juliet Schor — On AI
This page lists every Orange Pill Wiki entry hyperlinked from Juliet Schor — On AI. 18 entries total. Each is a deeper-dive on a person, concept, work, event, or technology that the book treats as a stepping stone for thinking through the AI revolution. Click any card to open the entry; in each entry, words colored in orange link to other Orange Pill Wiki entries, while orange-underlined words with the Wikipedia mark link to Wikipedia.
Ascending Friction
The Orange Pill's thesis that AI does not eliminate difficulty but relocates it to a higher cognitive floor — the engineer who no longer struggles with syntax struggles instead with architecture.
Countervailing Power
The Galbraithian concept — mobilized by Janah's framework and reactivated by the Muldoon study — that concentrated economic power generates its own counterweight through organized opposition, and that the counterweight is required for dig…
Flow State
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's name for the condition of optimal human engagement — and, in Wiener's framework, the subjective signature of a well-regulated negative feedback system.
Imagination-to-Artifact Ratio
Segal's term for the gap between what a person can conceive and what they can produce — which AI collapsed to approximately the length of a conversation, and which Gopnik's framework reveals to be an exploitation metric that leaves the exp…
Industrial Democracy
The Webbian proposition that the people who perform the work should have a voice in determining the conditions under which they perform it — the factory as a political space, not merely an economic one.
Institutional Sources of Overwork
Schor's framework identifying five structural components — compensation structure, status hierarchy, career trajectory, cultural narrative, and absence of countervailing support — that together produce overwork as an institutional equilibr…
Keynes's Fifteen-Hour Prediction
John Maynard Keynes's 1930 forecast in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren that productivity growth would deliver a fifteen-hour workweek by 2030 — the foundational broken promise of industrial-era economics.
Plenitude
Schor's alternative economic model — articulated in True Wealth (2010) — organized not around the maximization of output but around sufficiency of output combined with expanded time, community, and sustainability.
Status Hierarchy of Visible Intensity
The social mechanism by which knowledge-work cultures reward visible productive intensity — midnight shipping, weekend work, continuous availability — over outcomes, converting competition for status into competition for hours.
Task Seepage
The Berkeley researchers' term for the colonization of previously protected temporal spaces by AI-accelerated work — the mechanism through which the recovery windows of pre-AI workflows disappear.
The Four-Day Workweek
The institutional reform — piloted in Iceland, the UK, Portugal, and South Africa — that converts productivity gains into reduced hours at maintained pay, treating the workweek as a design variable rather than a natural constant.
The Productive Addiction as System Phenomenon
The specific behavioral configuration — compulsive AI-augmented engagement experienced as exhilaration from within and pathology from without — produced by a reinforcing loop without a balancing counterpart.
The Time Dividend
Schor's term for the phantom leisure that productivity gains make arithmetically possible but institutions fail to deliver — the hours that could have been freed and were absorbed instead.
The Work-Spend Cycle
Schor's four-stage mechanism by which productivity gains are systematically converted into more consumption and more work rather than more leisure — the engine that has absorbed every previous technological dividend.
