Who Should Own the Robots?
In late February,
Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who has since left the
organization, posted on X that something had broken in the
way software gets made. “It is hard to communicate how much programming has
changed due to AI in the last 2 months,” he wrote. Coding agents that “basically
didn’t work before December” had, in a matter of weeks, become capable enough
to “power through large and long tasks” and disrupt the default workflow of his
profession.
Weeks later, a
friend relayed an exchange I haven’t been able to shake. He’d been talking with
a group of experienced software engineers when one of them said: “My job title
is more like an AI manager now. I don’t have to really write the code. I input
prompts into one AI coding agent, I get another AI coding agent to run tests on
it, then I review it, and it goes into production.”
I don’t know
which model upgrade was responsible, but this is several years of skill
displaced—and the engineer describing this transition seemed proud of it. He
had handed over not just his work but the identity he might have built around
being a software developer; yet his narrative was one of empowerment.
That narrative is
a political problem. While previous waves of capital concentration sparked collective
reaction—resulting in the Knights of Labor during the industrial revolution and
the CIO during the digital revolution—AI displacement is producing a class
that can’t unionize because their roles are eliminated before class identity
can form. It doesn’t help that one of the most affected professions, tech
workers, were never strong unionizers to begin with: The first certified bargaining
union at a major American tech company formed in 2022 at Activision Blizzard. Knowledge workers are among the
least inclined to see themselves as “labor,” and tend to realize it only after
being displaced.
The standard counterargument to AI-fueled job loss is that the
technological leap will create jobs the same way computers and ultimately the
internet did. But even if the engineer I quoted above is right that his role merely changed,
there will be fewer managers than there had been coders, and the list of “doers”
who will no longer have much business in their own field gets lengthy: the
contractor in Ohio whose Structured Query Language work is now a SaaS subscription; the paralegal
whose document review is now done via large language model; the management consultant whose
throughput just doubled “thanks” to Copilot, but whose company is quickly absorbing
the productivity gain by reducing headcount. These people, or at least some of
them, will keep working—on tighter margins, in narrower roles.
But the question
that matters is: Who owns the machines that replaced some or all of their labor? Because
if we keep treating AI displacement as a misfortune to be managed, our proposals
will follow suit: Retrain, cushion, compensate the workers. That is a temporary
salve at most, not a sustainable remedy. A check can replace a paycheck, but it
won’t replace the identity that came with the work. The only sustainable
response is to keep displaced workers in the game—as owners of the capital that
replaced them.
Robots are
capital. It’s no secret that capital concentrates: Absent regulation, and in
the face of taxation systems structurally
favoring capital gains, every previous technological revolution led exactly here. Many
economists assume this as the default trajectory; the purpose of regulation and
the welfare state is to keep the dynamic in check. The United States has among the lowest tax-to-gross domestic product ratios
in the developed world, and that helps to explain why 11 out of the (currently) 15 trillion-dollar companies are based in the U.S.
It would be
simple to blame AI for its own side effects, but unless (or until) AI becomes
conscious it is still a tool in the hands of humans. Blaming it would be just
as misdirected as blaming cars for road accidents. Besides, AI is a
productivity booster on the scale of electrification; deployed correctly, it
could enable shorter hours, higher wages, and broad prosperity, the way
previous technological shifts eventually did. The blame lies instead with our failure
to keep wealth distribution in check, a flawed regulatory system that has been
corroding for decades and is now asked to absorb what seems poised to become the
largest productivity shock in living memory. Even if one leaves aside the
ethical nuances of this reality, what’s different this time is speed: Anthropic’s recent research shows adoption curves measured in months rather than the decades it took
computers to redraw the labor market. Displaced workers won’t have the time to
even realize what’s going on, let alone find each other, organize, and design
adequate institutions to navigate an orderly transition.
The result is a
strange political quiet on the subject, perhaps best signaled by the fact that
the loudest exception so far has come from the Vatican. In May, Pope Leo XIV devoted his first
encyclical to AI, widely covering the dignity of labor and the concentration of power in a
handful of companies. The letter was symbolically signed on the anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the 1891 encyclical on labor and capital addressing the industrial revolution. But a papal letter is not a movement, and the lack of
organized response among workers is conspicuous, because the dispossession is already
visible and material: Entry-level
hiring is collapsing in several industries, white-collar layoffs are the norm, the
Dallas Fed has flagged a pattern of productivity gains
without employment increases.
In Washington, some
progressive Democrats have made it a cause: Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the AI
Data Center Moratorium Act to freeze construction until federal safeguards
are in place. Sanders went further, proposing a Sovereign
Wealth Fund Act that would require 50
percent of the stock of the largest AI companies to be moved into a public
fund paying every American a dividend, similar to Norway’s oil fund model. This
proposal is an important corrective to a debate that has largely treated AI as an
energy and environmental challenge. But the remedy must reach further than a dividend
check. What needs protection isn’t just the workers but their identity—and if
that can no longer be provided by labor, it must come from becoming owners of
the machines that replaced them. Right now, the people being displaced remain
scattered and unorganized, but this is the demand they’ll make when they find
their voice.
Workers have
found their voice before: The Luddites protesting the mechanization of textile
mills set in motion a reform process that eventually led to the Factory Acts;
the introduction of computers in the 1970s and 1980s produced a fertile
conversation about de-skilling that ran for two decades, starting with Studs
Terkel’s Working in 1972 and culminating, in the optimism of the early
post–Cold War years, with the tech-friendly reforms promoted by the so-called
“Atari Democrats,” implemented during the Clinton-Gore presidency, and
intellectually enshrined in Jeremy Rifkin’s The End of Work in 1995.
None of these movements achieved everything they wanted, but like an immune
response, they produced lasting adaptations: political coalitions, regulation,
and a shared understanding of the problems at hand. The current moment has none
of this—not even a vocabulary for what’s happening. So far, the news coverage
has focused on side effects such as the strain data centers put on
energy grids and infrastructure and, more recently, AI’s use in cyberattacks; labor displacement registers, but
not with the weight it deserves.
If this
displacement concentrates wealth and power in the hands of whoever owns the AI,
leaving everyone else high and dry and potentially jobless, why have the
workers themselves stayed so quiet, with the resistance primarily delivered by
politicians? Because resistance requires class identity, which is exactly what
AI ends up dissolving. The steelworker had “steelworker.” The mill worker had
the mill. Historical labor movements were built on the recognition that workers
shared something specific—a craft, a workplace, a common antagonist—and that
recognition was the precondition for organizing. In a world where AI displaces
entire professions, the lawyer, the analyst, the programmer have no equivalent
community. Most AI practitioners are robots. The humans formerly representing
these professions are fewer, less powerful in output, scattered, individualized.
That looks more like a diaspora than a united constituency ready to
collectively push back.
Most critically,
these professional communities won’t reproduce. As AI performs more of the work
that used to define entry-level jobs, companies stop hiring humans for those
roles. This is the demographic equivalent of a fertility rate below
replacement: Given enough time, it leads to extinction. The professions get
replaced and therefore controlled by the machines that substituted them, under
the supervision of a much smaller number of people who own them. The policy
tools that could redirect this trajectory exist—retraining, expanded safety
nets, equity-sharing schemes, a serious conversation about what taxing AI productivity would look
like—but the people
who need them lack the coherence, and over time the critical mass, to demand
them politically.
The closest
historical analogue to this situation is feudalism, an observation others have
made—Yanis Varoufakis and Cédric Durand have famously argued that we’ve
already entered a “techno-feudal” order, in which tech giants extract rents the
way medieval lords once did. The parallel is correct, but it understates the
effect of AI on the political dynamics. Feudalism persisted for centuries,
despite the serfs having very clear ideas on what fairness would have looked
like: Medieval uprisings, from the Jacquerie of 1358 to the Peasants’ Revolt of
1381, show the injustice was perfectly well understood. But feudalism had the
upper hand because organization across communities and regions was effectively
impossible, leaving serfs trapped in the cycle of survival, season over season,
working land that wasn’t owned.
What eventually changed
was a slow accumulation of forces—trade, urbanization, religious schisms, even
the plague—and among them, a technology: the printing press, gradually changing
the way information could travel. It took three centuries, through the
Reformation and the Enlightenment, but by 1789 those forces had compounded
enough for the Bastille to fall.
Replace land with “compute,” and the dynamic rhymes. Except
this time the intervening technology, AI, is working in the opposite direction,
and this is where the “techno-feudalism” parallel breaks down: The printing
press enabled collective action, while AI effectively suppresses it. It
atomizes the workforce, accelerates displacement beyond the pace at which workers
can build the institutions that might represent them, and concentrates the
surplus in a small number of firms. Those firms are now powerful enough to
resemble sovereign states, they are ruled as near-absolute monarchies, and
their leaders have enough economic firepower to dominate the public discourse. Think
of a middle-class family in America today, how little time they have for civic
action after all the demands of the household are met, and suddenly the
comparison with the Middle Ages feels real.
Granted, the
informed public already harbors strong feelings toward large tech companies in
general, and toward AI specifically. In poll after poll, a majority of
Americans express worries about AI and want more regulation of it. Sometimes that is expressed
in real-world terms, in communities’ slowing or blocking data centers or ChatGPT users’ mass-uninstalling the app after the organization cut
a deal with the Pentagon. People aren’t passive. But local action and individual consumer choice aren’t
the same as organized, broad-based political power.
The geographic
split compounds the problem. Countries with existing social contracts and
collective institutions—the Nordics, parts of continental Europe, parts of East
Asia—have a foundation to build on, however imperfect. The United States is
running this experiment with the lowest union density in the
developed world, weakened federal labor enforcement, and a policy debate that has
barely begun to treat AI as a political question at all. This is also where
much of AI development is concentrated—in the country least equipped to
equitably redistribute the gains.
If the net effect
of AI is to mark the end of labor—more precisely, the end of labor as the
primary factor producing wealth for the majority of the population—the solution
has to come from decoupling identity from labor. This implies rebuilding
identity itself: civic participation, community, new forms of solidarity rooted
not in what people do for a living but in what they are trying to protect; a
mission-driven identity, to replace the wage-driven one that industrial labor produced.
John Maynard Keynes
imagined, almost a century ago, that abundance would eventually let civilization
turn to higher endeavors; Francis Fukuyama later predicted “centuries of
boredom” at the end of history. Neither vision has materialized, but their
underlying intuition is worth rescuing: We’re not walking a path, we are the
path. When the path stops, so does our identity; avoiding that requires
dedicating ourselves to a meaningful objective.
Right now, a
meaningful enough objective is to figure out a stable social contract that
doesn’t sink democracy into the oligarchy of a few trillionaires. The tools to
make this happen aren’t mysterious. We know how to tax the productivity of
capital, and we know it wouldn’t stifle innovation. We know how to widen
ownership of productive assets: employee equity, public positions in the models
and the compute, a sovereign fund that pays the public a dividend on the robots,
the way Norway reinvests its oil revenue in public services.
On the upside, the
speed of displacement—which makes this a crisis rather than a stable order that
could last for centuries—might precipitate a viable solution. As more
professionals experience displacement personally, as more entry-level workers
can’t find jobs, the societal strain becomes visible in daily life: families
forced to move 20 streets down as desirable neighborhoods are scooped up by
new millionaires; workers forced to work longer shifts and multiple jobs to cover
the gap between wages and cost of living; coffee shops filling up with hopeless
job applicants on laptops; a shrinking tax base offering fewer social services
to people who suddenly need more of them. Eventually, the shared experience
itself becomes the basis for a new solidarity.
Not everyone needs
to organize. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute found that when a committed minority reaches
10 percent of a population, the idea or
behavior they hold becomes a majority view. Applied to social change, once that threshold is
crossed, the idea “spreads like flame.” The open question is whether that
threshold can be reached before a new class of techno-oligarchs has reshaped
public institutions into something we no longer recognize as democracy.
What equivalent
of the printing press can get the right constituency to activate, and drive
society toward a more equitable, prosperous future? A good start would be to
understand what small, incremental steps anyone can take. One such step is active
participation in civic life, which starts from voting and leads to
near-impossible feats such as the election of an immigrant of Indian descent as
the mayor of New York City. Another step is letting go of the myth that capital
deconcentration is impossible, which starts from choosing one’s investments
based on impact instead of sheer returns, and comes full circle not in the
money it returns but in the impact it forces—as in 2021, when Engine No. 1, a tiny activist fund
backed by the three largest U.S. pension funds, won three seats on ExxonMobil’s board and pushed the oil major to take
the energy transition seriously. Finally, and most importantly, society should
understand that the people on the losing side of the AI rupture are not a
professional diaspora to be cared for—supported as they ride into the sunset, perhaps
handed some kind of pension—but a still-unorganized constituency of workers
waiting to become stakeholders.
Whether they
become stakeholders is the whole question. If workers come to own a piece of
the machines, they’ll keep their identity, share the gains, and all of us will
be able to work less. This is Keynes’s vision, finally realized. If workers don’t,
they’ll be deprived of their jobs, their identity, and their share of the
wealth all at once, while the world increasingly belongs to a handful of
techno-oligarchs who are clearly less interested in democracy than they are in
amassing wealth.
