I think we’re having the wrong conversation about AI and work.
The problem isn’t that AI might take our jobs. That’s the dream, really. The dream of technology, for most of human history, was that eventually we would have to spend less of our lives working just to survive. Machines were supposed to do the drudgery. Automation was supposed to increase productivity. Technology was supposed to give us more time to be human.And now we have built machines that might actually be capable of doing a meaningful amount of the work humans currently have to do, and capitalism has somehow convinced us that this is a catastrophe.
Not because people will have nothing to do. But instead because people might no longer be economically necessary.
I don’t think most people are actually afraid of having eight hours of their day back. They’re afraid that if they aren’t working, they won’t be able to pay rent. They’re afraid they’ll lose their health insurance. They’re afraid they won’t be able to feed their children. They’re afraid they’ll lose their home. They’re afraid that decades of being told to sell their time to someone else in exchange for the right to exist will suddenly come due.We’ve constructed a society where your job isn’t merely something you do. Your job is the mechanism through which you’re permitted to have a life.
That’s why the prospect of technological unemployment is so terrifying. It’s not really the unemployment people are afraid of. It’s everything that unemployment has been deliberately tied to. We have spent generations teaching people that work provides dignity, purpose, structure, and meaning. Some of it probably does. Work can be meaningful. It can give people community and a sense of accomplishment.
But underneath all of that is a much uglier bargain: work, or you don’t get to live comfortably. And now we’ve built machines that threaten to make human labor less necessary. Of course people are terrified.
Notice what we do with that fear. We don’t ask whether everyone should have access to the benefits of technological abundance. We ask how we can keep everyone employed. We don’t ask whether working forty hours a week should still be necessary. We ask what new bullshit jobs we can invent to absorb the people AI makes redundant. We don’t ask who should own the productivity gains from automation. We tell displaced workers to learn Python, or prompt engineering, or whatever the latest flavor of “adapt or die” happens to be. Meanwhile, the people who own the models, the compute, the data centers, the platforms, the stolen intellectual property, and the capital required to build all of it are positioned to capture the gains.
This is the part of the AI conversation I find almost impossible to not get angry about. We’re being told that AI is going to transform civilization. Maybe it will. But somehow the proposed transformation always seems to stop just short of transforming capitalism.
The machines can change. The workers have to change. The economy can become radically more productive. But somehow the basic arrangement remains sacred: a tiny number of people own the productive machinery, and everyone else has to figure out how to remain useful to them. That’s not technological progress. That’s capitalism adapting to new technology.
That is a huge difference.
If AI really can produce more with fewer human beings, then we have a choice about what that productivity is for. We can use it to give people more freedom, shorten the workweek, guarantee healthcare outside employment, make housing a human necessity rather than an investment vehicle, and build systems where losing your job doesn’t mean losing your life. Or we can use it to make a handful of already-wealthy people even wealthier while millions of other people compete for the shrinking number of jobs that remain. We can privatize the gains and socialize the consequences, then tell everyone whose livelihood has been destroyed that this is simply what progress looks like.
And then we can wonder why they’re afraid of the future.
The AI companies keep telling us to imagine a world where intelligence is abundant. Fine. Let’s imagine it. But let’s not stop at the part where the machines write the code, generate the marketing copy, analyze the spreadsheets, or automate the administrative work.
Let’s imagine what happens when human beings genuinely don’t have to spend most of their waking lives making someone else richer just to afford the basic necessities of being alive. Because if your technology makes it possible for fewer people to do the work required to sustain society, and your response is to figure out how to keep everyone working anyway, then you weren’t really building technology to liberate people. You were building a more efficient way to extract value from them.
The problem isn’t that AI might take our jobs. The problem is that we’ve built a society where becoming economically unnecessary can make you disposable.
If that is the reality we live in, then perhaps the thing we should be questioning isn’t what the machines are going to do to us. It’s why we built a world in which a human being’s survival depends on being useful to the machine.
