. You could lose your job because of AI. Maybe you already do. Maybe he's fighting to break into an industry that now hires fewer young people. And if your job survives, competition can be tough: fewer opportunities, higher expectations, lower bargaining power.
However, AI alone is not dangerous. AI is being deployed within economies where workers have little control over how the benefits of productivity are distributed.
AI Concerns Make Sense
Technological change is constantly reshaping labor markets. Some jobs disappear, others appear, and society adapts. So isn't AI just another technology that will make some jobs obsolete in favor of efficiency while new jobs are created? Many argue that it is not. Although it is difficult to have a clear vision of what the future will look like, the belief is that AI is fundamentally different because of the scale and speed of disruption it can cause.
New agent models can perform certain planning tasks at a level approaching or exceeding experienced engineers, and exhibit human qualities such as judgment and taste. [1]. Software engineering is only the beginning of many information industries that are being transformed, such as AI that can code that “can help build its next version”.
However, the impact of AI is seen in many different professions. A specialist translator of standard business documents sees clients disappear almost overnight. A customer support worker is told to monitor chatbots instead of talking to people. The junior paralegal who once learned by summarizing case law or doing legal research is now competing with seniors augmented by AI tools.
Some worry that a large portion of computer-based information work may end up being automated, with large layoffs occurring at the same time. [2]. Even though AI may create some new jobs, it does not look like the new jobs created by AI will compensate for the amount and quality of jobs being eliminated.
Even worse, being fired from a job isn't just about negative consequences. Many companies are clearly looking at AI as a tool to reduce headcount. We see this from the point of view of a “one man company […] amounting to billions of dollars” [3] and controversial ad campaigns urging to “stop hiring humans” in favor of AI, which “wouldn't complain about work-life balance” [4].
AI Automation Is Not a Real Problem
Businesses operating in competitive markets are structurally motivated to reduce costs and increase productivity. A fair part of it is to reduce costs related to work. Therefore, if technology exists, which is cheaper and more efficient than human labor, it is in the company's interest to replace or reduce the number of people involved in production. Costs go down, dividends go up. No one can argue with this image. But this view makes technology good for business owners, and bad for workers, promoting anti-technology attitudes like Luddism.
There is an alarmingly overlooked way in which technology can help employees.
Imagine a worker who is ten times more productive thanks to AI. Suppose production needs to remain constant due to constant demand. The community can respond in at least two ways:
- One employee keeps his job while nine lose theirs.
- Ten employees keep their jobs, but all work very few hours.
Technology alone does not determine what outcome occurs.
Politics, labor power, and economic institutions do.
Increased Productivity Did Not Decrease Working Hours
History suggests that productivity gains are rarely automatically distributed in favor of workers. For example, since the most important thing we have in life is time, and technology requires less time to perform tasks, we would expect this to reflect working hours. Since World War II, workers have been incredibly productive thanks to industrialization, computers, logistics, and automation.
However, most productivity gains are not converted into leisure time.² They are converted into profits, higher compensation, and shareholder value.
Of course, sharing the benefits of productivity does not mean only shorter working hours. It could also mean higher wages, stronger public services, worker ownership, or wider public participation in automatically generated wealth. But if the entire impact of technology is increasing inequality, we know that the benefits have not been sufficiently shared.
So the important political and economic question is how the resulting benefits are distributed. If they are too favorable to the owners, it may cause the disastrous results we described earlier. If it is used to benefit workers, it can improve the lives of ordinary people. The great economists of history, from Mill to Keynes, held the same view, saying that the ultimate goal of technology would be to reduce the time devoted to work. [5, 6].
Productivity Benefits Have Always Been Political
So the main point is how we manage to deal with this tension between benefiting investors over workers. During the Industrial Revolution,¹ workers did not automatically benefit from productivity gains. Factory owners are very rich while workers endure brutal conditions and long hours [7]. Improvements came later – through unions, political pressure, labor laws, and collective bargaining.
Since the 1980s, the labor movement has weakened, and the general trend is that the impact of technology has brought more benefits to the owners than to the workers. [8]. The labor movement is now so weak, that we take it for granted that all the profits related to technology must go to the owners of the companies.
AI Can Create Two Futures
If the benefits of AI are skewed to benefit investors (as they have been for the past 50 years), the result could be massive job displacement, increased homelessness, and extreme inequality. Economic power may be concentrated among a small number of firms and investors, while the majority of the population faces growing distrust. Even proposals like universal basic income [2] finally raise the same question: who owns the wealth generated by automation?³
If we can spread the benefits of AI in favor of workers, technological progress will not translate into greater insecurity. People will be able to work less instead of being useful. Working fewer hours will leave more time for creativity, relationships, health, social participation, and relaxation.
So, the question is not “Will AI replace us?”, but rather:
“Who is capturing the productivity benefits of AI”?
What you and I have to fight for
So, AI is not ruining your career. With AI, you can keep your job while being healthier. But this requires acknowledging the existing power relations with workers. If there are no ways to manage the benefits of AI in favor of society as a whole, AI will greatly increase inequality. This may require fighting to defend your rights, but if you choose the wrong target, you will fail.
Your goal is inequality, not technology.
Of course, businesses cannot simply cut working hours overnight while keeping wages the same. Competition, international markets, and profit pressures are real issues. But that is precisely the point: the economic and social system determines how the benefits of technology are distributed. If economic and social pressures only reward profit maximization, AI will not improve workers' conditions. It will reinforce existing inequalities instead.
If instead the interests of the workers are taken into account, we can hope to reach a sweet spot between productivity and well-being. This can be achieved by fighting for workers' rights and better regulation, but it can take many forms. Workers' cooperatives are one example of an economic structure where workers benefit directly from the profits of production, and AI is socially managed – as is the case for example in Switzerland. [9]- another one.
Real Question
AI doesn't force your employer to fire you. This is a practical choice. Every major technological revolution raises the same political question:
Who benefits?
If the benefits of AI are captured exclusively by owners and shareholders, inequality will deepen.
If the benefits are shared widely, AI can reduce working hours, improve quality of life, and expand human freedom on a scale unimaginable by previous generations.
AI will not decide what future we get.
We will.
References
[1] Matt Schumer, Something Big Happens, 2026.
[2] A. Yang, The End of the Office, 2026,
[3] A. Ohanian,
[4] MA Bitoon's billboards, “Stop hiring people” spark a backlash against AI amid tech layoffs.
[5] JS Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1848.
[6] Keynes, JM (1930). Persuasive essays. Palgrave Macmillan London.
[7] EJ Hobsbawm. “Standards of living during the Industrial Revolution: a discussion.” Economic History Review 16.1 (1963): 119–134.
[8] The Productivity–Pay Gap, Economic Policy Center, March 2026
[9]
[10] Referenced data can be obtained through our worldindata database: Those figures are obtained from Feenstra et al. – Penn World Table (2025)
Footnotes
- Things went very differently in many parts of the world, for example between colonial and colonial states, different forms of law, levels of democracy, and economies. I still prefer to stay general, as being too specific can lead us away from the main point of the text, which is AI.
- Data from the World Penn Table shows that, since 1950, productivity has increased by a factor of about 4 in the USA, 10 in Greece, 15 in Germany, and 30 in South Korea. [10]. However, working hours did not decrease by the same factor. Except for a few European countries, it has not decreased at all.
- In a society where work is replaced by AI, taxes on labor will be much lower, so in order to sustainably support a universal basic income, it will be necessary to move from labor to wealth taxation.
Pictures in this article
All images produced by the author using chatGPT5.5.
