The human side of the automation debate usually starts at a kitchen counter, and that is exactly where Charles Hugh Smith begins. On his, a coffee maker, rice cooker and microwave have all passed 25 years of daily service without a repair bill, and his 1998 car, 28 years old, needs only modest upkeep and could plausibly run another 12, a 40-year working life from one purchase. From that counter the veteran blogger, writing on 19 June 2026 at his Of Two Minds site with the essay syndicated days later at LewRockwell, asks the question now hanging over every AI rollout: what if the work we are so busy automating never needed doing in the first place?
Behind the breakthrough talk, Smith is attacking a creed. He names it The Mythology of Progress, a faith that Progress is unstoppable because technology is its engine, and he says the people who hold it treat questioning as blasphemy, answering with silence. His Exhibit A is the euphoria around modular nuclear reactors, headlines promising thousands of them on the road to super-abundance while, in his reading, not a single unit runs around the clock reliably, safely and cheaply. The possibility that what he calls Anti-Progress might not just stall Progress but reverse it is, he writes, strictly verboten.
Then comes the parable. Suppose a new law forced every citizen to wear a Silly Hat out in public. Economic activity would surge: Gross Domestic Product, business profits, employment and taxes would all climb as lawyers defined what qualifies, regulators codified hat safety, the fashion trade rolled out designer and celebrity and Hello Kitty versions, retailers discounted cheap imported models and finance minted a bubble. “The Silly Hat Index soars, minting thousands of mega-millionaires.” The boom would be entirely real, Smith concedes, and entirely worthless. “I consider it self-evident that much of our economy is nothing more than Silly Hats that we call something else that sounds less silly.” In his accounting, the slice of the economy producing life’s actual essentials is dwarfed by the share given to marketing, public relations and unproductive engagement, to legal and regulatory busy-work, to the meetings, the junkets, the conferences, the endless needless communications, and to the shadow-work of coping with the complexity all of it generates.
For families, his technology indictment lands closest to home. New appliances, he argues, fail within a few years, and the electronics packed into modern vehicles will die long before 28 years of service, let alone 40, with repairs priced outrageously. “The problem with durable, low-maintenance, low-operating cost technologies is self-evident: they’re not as profitable as planned obsolescence or extracting monthly fees from owners.” That is the engine of the whole system, he says: subscriptions charged for using machines the owner already bought, upgrades designed to obsolete what came before. His verdict is blunt; by his standard of high-value technology, “virtually all the technology produced today is inferior or defective”, the very definition of his Anti-Progress.
What this means for the people inside the current AI hype cycle is a sharper question to ask before the next rollout. Smith closes the circle on automation itself: because automating inferior technology and Silly Hats is expected to lift profits, it gets stamped innovative and progressive, though he calls it the opposite of both. Strip the mythology away, he writes, and the driver is simpler. “Our economy isn’t driven by innovation, it’s driven by greed.” Making durable products, a technology mastered decades ago, simply pays less than selling things built to fail. His sign-off is pitched at the gods he says the culture worships: they sound angry, so who gets sacrificed today to appease them?
Sources
- Of Two Minds – What If the Work We're Busy Automating Is Needless?
- What If the Work We're Busy Automating Is Needless? – LewRockwell
