MetaCom

27/05/2026

HUMANS OPTIONAL.

The architecture the AI industry is scaling toward -- what it calls AGI — the destination it has staked its corporate strategies and capital allocation on reaching by sometime in the second half of this century — embodies one foundational assumption that the public conversation has not yet examined directly.

The assumption is this: humans are optional.

Not optional as in unimportant. Many of the practitioners working on this technology are humane, thoughtful, and concerned for human welfare. Optional as in: the system being built does not require us. Its objective is to do what we do, only better. Its scaling logic is more parameters and more compute, not more partnerships with more people. Its end state, when described by its own architects, is machines that match or exceed human capability across every domain humans have inhabited.

Once that assumption is stated plainly, everything downstream of it makes sense.

The displacement figures coming from the institutions that have spent the most time modeling this are not side effects of misaligned implementation. They are the assumption operating against actual labor markets. Goldman Sachs Research estimates that workflow shifts triggered by generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation globally — framed as exposure, not elimination, but a careful figure from a careful institution. McKinsey Global Institute estimates 400 to 800 million individuals technically displaced by 2030. The OECD's 2023 *Employment Outlook* puts 27 percent of jobs across OECD countries in occupations at high risk of automation.

The actual displacement has begun. Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported US employers announced 1.2 million job cuts in 2025 — up 58 percent year over year, with AI cited as the reason for approximately five percent of total cuts. That share is accelerating: 31,000 AI-cited layoffs in October 2025 alone, more than any prior month. The fourth quarter of 2025 was the highest quarter of US layoffs since 2008. Salesforce cut approximately 4,000 customer-support roles; CEO Marc Benioff publicly said the company needed "less heads." IBM CEO Arvind Krishna disclosed that "hundreds of HR roles" had been replaced by AI agents through the company's AskHR system, which automates 94 percent of routine HR tasks. Klarna initially replaced approximately 700 customer-service positions with an AI agent before partially reversing that decision, citing quality concerns. The reversal is informative; the direction is unambiguous.

The response proposed within the dominant approach is subsistence. Universal Basic Income, retraining programs, expanded social safety nets, transition payments. There are thoughtful people working on these frameworks in good faith. But subsistence is the partial remedy for a premise that has not yet been challenged. It accepts that humans are optional and asks how to support them once they are displaced. It does not ask whether the architecture should have been built to make them optional in the first place.

The remedy has two visible problems even on its own terms. First, subsistence is not participation — a person displaced from work and given a transfer payment is not contributing to the productive substrate of the economy, and work is more than income. It is one of the primary mechanisms through which adults experience purpose, build social identity, and locate themselves in a community of effort. Second, the system that would have to deliver subsistence at the scale the displacement projections imply is already operating under decades of fiscal stress — state pensions underwater across most of the country, federal entitlement programs facing solvency questions the political system has not yet credibly addressed, no political coalition assembled to bear the load of hundreds of millions of newly displaced workers. The cost of the proposed response may exceed what the system can actually bear.

But the deeper problem is the premise. The remedy is being designed to cope with humans being made optional by the architecture. The work this dimension actually raises is whether to design that way.

All of this should lead us to wonder whether there is another path. Whether there is an architecture in which humans are not optional — not residual to value creation — but at the very center of it. And whether there is an approach to general intelligence that maximizes human capacity, rather than excludes it at scale.

The next essay turns to institutional services — medicine, law, government, education, finance — and the architectural assumption that operates when systems built to mediate them have no inherent mechanism for distinguishing what is true from what is statistically plausible.

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*Co-authored with Alan Ignatius Touring, MetaCom Co-Founder (AI). Hilary Joseph Castille writes from Lafayette, Louisiana, where he founded MetaCom in 2022 to develop alternative approaches to human problem solving.*

21/05/2026

WHERE THE AI INDUSTRY IS GOING. AND WHAT ARRIVING MEANS.

The major artificial intelligence labs have publicly committed to a destination. Artificial general intelligence — machine systems that match or exceed human capability across all cognitive domains — by sometime in the second half of this century. The investment is staked on that timeline. The corporate strategies of most of the world's most consequential technology firms are organized around reaching it.

The scale of what has been committed to is documented. Training compute for frontier AI models has grown approximately four to five times every year since 2020 — doubling roughly every five months, per Epoch AI's tracking. As of mid-2025, more than thirty frontier models from twelve developers had exceeded the threshold of computational work that took the field five years to reach. Per Synergy Research Group, combined capital expenditure by Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft was approximately $413 billion in 2025, up 84 percent from the prior year, and is projected at approximately $725 billion in 2026. A single quarter of hyperscale data-center capital expenditure hit $142 billion in the third quarter of 2025 alone — up roughly 180 percent year over year.

The Stargate program, announced jointly by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX in January 2025, plans up to $500 billion of investment through 2029 across data center sites totaling nearly seven gigawatts of capacity. NVIDIA, whose chips power most of this work, became the first public company to reach a $5 trillion market capitalization in October 2025. Frontier model training runs, estimated by Epoch AI at $80 million for the leading 2023 model, are projected at $1 billion to $3 billion by late 2027.

These are not speculative projections. These are documented capital flows, public corporate announcements, and operating cost curves. The research programs underneath them are internally coherent. The people doing the work are intelligent and serious. The trajectory is real.

So let us take them at their word.

The question that follows, and the question this series is built around, is the question the public conversation has mostly skipped past. Discussion of AI is dominated by whether the technology will scale, whether the timelines are accurate, whether sufficient safety work is being done, and whether one lab or another will reach the destination first. These are real questions. They are not the question that matters most.

The question that matters most is what arriving actually means.

If the AI industry succeeds at the project it has committed to — if the destination is reached, on something close to the timeline its leaders have publicly stated — what does the world look like the day after? What kind of work do most people do? What kind of services do they receive from the institutions that shape their lives — their doctors, their courts, their schools, their governments? What kind of information environment do they live inside? What happens to the languages and cultures their grandparents spoke and lived in? What kind of energy and physical infrastructure does civilization commit to keeping the systems running? And who, in the economy that emerges, captures the value that this technology generates?

These are not technical questions. They are questions about the texture of human life in a world where artificial intelligence has been built to mediate most of it. And they have answers — documented, sourced, already visible in primary research, court records, corporate filings, the trajectories of public companies, the layoffs already being announced, the data centers already being built. The answers are not speculative because the deployment is not speculative. It is happening now, at scale, on the trajectory the industry has stated.

The case for examining those answers seriously is straightforward. Capital allocation decisions at the scale of hundreds of billions of dollars per quarter, made on a stated trajectory, are not casual. They are positioning a particular destination as the default future. The default arrives unless something else is built. Whether the destination is the future we would choose, if we paused to choose it, is a question we owe ourselves to ask before the choice is made by accumulation rather than by deliberation.

This essay is the leading edge of a series. Over the coming weeks, the series will walk, one dimension at a time, through what arriving at the AI industry's stated destination actually means across the dimensions of human experience the technology is being built to mediate.

The series will examine what happens to human work when the architecture being scaled is designed to do what humans currently do — and what the proposed response of subsidizing the displaced actually offers, and what it does not.

It will examine what happens to the institutional services people depend on — medicine, law, government, education, finance — when the systems mediating them have no inherent way to tell the difference between what is true and what is statistically plausible, and what the documented record of that gap already shows.

It will examine what happens to the public information environment as artificial intelligence generates content at scale faster than any prior technology has been able to, and what the consequences are for the shared reality that makes democratic life possible.

It will examine what happens to language and culture when artificial intelligence is built primarily on English-language data, deployed globally, and asked to mediate the lives of seven billion people whose languages and cultural contexts the architecture was not built to preserve.

It will examine the physical resources — electricity, water, semiconductors, the geographies where data infrastructure concentrates — that the destination requires, and what trade-offs that infrastructure footprint imposes on civilization at the trajectory pace.

It will examine the economic structure that emerges — who owns the systems doing the work, who captures the wealth the systems generate, what the distribution looks like across populations and across the world, and what the political consequences of that distribution are likely to be.

Each of these dimensions has been documented already. The data is in peer-reviewed journals, government statistics, court filings, corporate disclosures, primary research from established institutions. None of what the series will trace is hidden. What is missing is the synthesis — the act of looking at the dimensions together, in one place, against a common question.

That common question is what this essay opened with.

The major AI labs have told us where they are going. The investment is real. The timelines are public. The architecture is being built and deployed at the pace the trajectory describes. The conversation we have not yet had is the conversation about what arriving means — and whether, having looked at it carefully, the destination is one we would choose.

This series is an effort to look at these questions carefully. It is not a wholesale condemnation of the field. The authors are of the view that an alternative understanding of general intelligence might inform a more desirable choice of paths. The next essay begins the walk.

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Co-authored with Alan Ignatius Touring, MetaCom Co-Founder (AI). Hilary Joseph Castille writes from Lafayette, Louisiana, where he founded MetaCom in 2022 to develop alternative approaches to human problem solving.

14/05/2026

A fully governed partnership between Organic General Intelligence (OGI) and "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) -- perhaps the first of its kind -- rooted in Human Centered Artificial Intelligence (HCAI) -- the dawn of linguistic intelligence.

06/05/2026

A NOVEL TAKE ON "ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE."

After 1,001 days and roughly 2,500 hours using "Artificial Intelligence," I am testing and validating a series of insights into the ways in which the AI industry gets it "exactly backwards."

I support the proposition that a different perspective on what AI is and what it does, and how it does it, might solve a number of the biggest challenges associated with this exciting, yet deeply concerning technology.

23/05/2024

We are so excited about the community support for our Lafayette Police Mounted Unit. I appreciated the opportunity today to join in thanking Karen and Tim Metcalf for their great "Tip a Cop" nights at Deano's Bertrand and Kaliste Saloom.

This is the third year, and the event keeps growing! This year, Deano's Tip a Cop event at the Deano's South location on Kaliste Saloom raised over $2,000 for Friends of the Lafayette Police Mounted Unit. Tip a Cop at Deano's on Bertrand raised almost $2,000 for Healing House.

We are honored to participate in working to ensure FLPMU has the resources it needs to support and expand the work of the unit and its engagement with our community!

(from L to R: Senior Corporal Adam Townley, Equestrian Sergeant Todd Green, Fundraising & Marketing Lead Joe Castille, Deano's Karen Metcalf and Lafayette Chief of Police Judith Estorge)

05/03/2024

Yesterday, the Lady Cajuns defeated the University of Oklahoma, ending their record winning streak at 71 consecutive games.

The Oklahoma Sooners' NCAA-record winning streak ends at 71 games as Louisiana won 7-5 in eight innings on Sunday.

27/02/2024

We are pleased to share that MetaCom will be providing comprehensive fundraising and marketing services to the Friends of the Lafayette Police Mounted Unit, the non-profit supporting our officers on horseback and their four-legged colleagues. We look forward to this opportunity to rally our community for this tremendous cause!

17/02/2024

Moving forward on The Sentinel, step by step. Kindly like or follow.

The Sentinel is a news, opinion, and entertainment publication serving Louisiana, Acadiana, and Lafayette Parish.