The Language of Self-Abolition

“Marketing without compromise. AI takes over campaign management.” The human still provides the “finishing touches.” I read the sentence twice because I wanted to make sure I understood it correctly.

Ten pages earlier it said: AI is support, not replacement. The human stays at the center. The machine assists. All good. Standard. The usual promise.

And then the machine takes over campaign management. The human provides finishing touches. Finishing touches. That’s the word people use for the last correction before something goes out. It’s the word for the part you could also skip.

The AI industry doesn’t notice the contradiction. Or it notices and doesn’t consider it one. Both are telling.

Language reveals what arguments conceal. AI literature is full of it. At the start, the words are “support,” “complement,” “assist.” The human acts, the machine helps. Then the vocabulary shifts. AI “takes over.” It “controls.” It “manages.” The human “provides input.” He “refines.” He “curates.”

This shift doesn’t happen in a single sentence. It happens gradually. Slowly enough that you don’t notice if you’re not paying attention. But if you lay the verbs side by side, they tell a different story than the text claims.

First AI supports the sales team. Then it takes over customer communication. Then it controls workforce planning. Then it manages campaigns. The direction is clear. The human gets pushed a little further to the margin at every step. But the word “replace” never appears.

That’s not sloppiness. That’s technique. There are words you can’t use in a business context because they trigger fear. “Replace” is one of them. So you use others. Take over. Control. Automate. Optimize. Each of these words describes the same process without calling it by its name.

I’ve worked with language for years, in consulting, in strategy papers, in negotiations. I know the trick. You don’t say: We’re laying people off. You say: We’re optimizing the team structure. You don’t say: The product has a problem. You say: We’ve identified improvement potential. The reality stays the same. The feeling changes.

What’s being described is the self-abolition of the human in the value chain. Step by step. In polite language. With positive verbs. Nobody gets replaced. Everyone gets “relieved of burdens.” Nobody loses their job. Everyone gets “more strategic roles.” What a more strategic role looks like when the machine runs the strategy isn’t explained.

In the end, the human still appears in the text. He provides finishing touches. He curates. He gives input. But if you count the verbs that belong to him, three or four remain. The rest belong to the machine.

The language says: partnership. The grammar says: the human has become the subordinate clause.

If you want to know what a text really thinks, don’t read the theses. Read the verbs. Look at who acts in the sentences and who gets described. Look at who is the subject and who is the object. The conviction isn’t hidden in the arguments. It’s hidden in the grammar.

“Marketing without compromise. AI takes over campaign management.” It’s right there, in the open, in one sentence. The industry thinks it’s a promise. I think it’s a confession.