Three paths forward, each challenging what we value most.
Photo by Josh Johnson on UnsplashI suspect artificial intelligence may eventually accomplish what generations of socialists have struggled to achieve. And the irony is that capitalism may ultimately be responsible for making it happen.
What makes this possibility particularly uncomfortable for me is that my political instincts lean libertarian. I have never been particularly enthusiastic about government-supplemented incomes, wealth redistribution, or expanding the state’s role in economic life.
Yet the more I consider the potential consequences of AI-driven automation and its displacement of human labor, the more I recognize that a greater degree of centralized collective support may be necessary for society to continue to prosper.
The economic arrangements I have long defended, particularly free markets and the principle of individual economic independence, may become difficult to sustain—not because their underlying principles have been disproven, but because the technology we are developing could fundamentally change the conditions upon which they depend.
AI itself does not decide who benefits from its capabilities or who bears the costs. People do, through choices shaped by ambition, self-interest, competition, and greed. We may build machines capable of extraordinary intellectual achievements without becoming any wiser about the desires that govern their use. Those human incentives complicate every path forward.
We appear to be heading toward a future in which artificial intelligence allows companies to produce much of what we need with a fraction of today’s workforce. Previous technological revolutions displaced workers but also created new occupations, and if you’re feeling optimistic, AI may do the same.
But that optimism rests on the assumption that AI will follow a familiar historical pattern. Unlike previous technologies that automated particular forms of work, AI can perform an expanding range of intellectual tasks across industries, including some of the very capabilities people have historically relied upon to adapt to technological change.
What happens to an economic system built around the relationship between work and income when fewer people are needed to produce the goods and services society consumes? And more interestingly, what happens to our philosophical convictions when the conditions that once justified them fundamentally change?
As I see it, such a future points toward three broad directions, each requiring us to sacrifice one value in pursuit of another. Of course, some would argue that compromises are possible between the scenarios I’m about to present. Yet I question whether such compromises would offer more than temporary relief from the underlying tensions.
The First Path: Sacrifice Profits to Preserve Jobs
The first path forward would require businesses to sacrifice the additional profits AI could generate in order to preserve human employment and the economy built around it. This would not necessarily mean accepting losses or abandoning profitability, but rather voluntarily forgoing opportunities to earn more by replacing workers with AI. Companies would need to exercise restraint, even when doing so puts them at a competitive disadvantage.
The problem is that businesses have powerful incentives to maximize profits, often by reducing costs and improving efficiency. As AI becomes more capable, replacing human workers becomes an attractive way to accomplish both, particularly when competitors are doing the same. Yet workers are also customers, and if enough people lose their jobs, businesses could eventually undermine the consumer economy that supports their profits.
This is not simply a question of corporate greed, although in many cases it is. Some companies pursue greater profits, while others must reduce costs to remain competitive or survive. But companies are ultimately run by people, and the pursuit of wealth and power is as old as civilization itself.
Greed has been recognized as a moral failing for centuries, yet that recognition has done little to eliminate it from human behavior. Expecting business leaders to collectively resist opportunities for greater wealth, particularly when their competitors have every incentive to pursue them, strikes me as wishful thinking.
Sure, governments could attempt to impose such restraint through regulations, financial penalties, or incentives to retain workers. But businesses have spent generations minimizing taxes, relocating operations, lobbying lawmakers, and finding ways around regulations. Ultimately, such measures would do little to change the underlying incentive driving these decisions, as businesses will continue to seek opportunities to increase profits, even when doing so comes at the expense of human employment.
The Second Path: Turn Away from AI
Rather than continuing down our current path, relying on businesses to restrain their pursuit of profits, or implementing targeted government regulations that may prove difficult to enforce, we could take a far more drastic approach and severely restrict the development and use of AI altogether. The objective would be to preserve the jobs on which economic independence currently depends.
I understand the appeal of protecting people’s ability to support themselves through their own work, but consider what such a decision could cost us. AI might accelerate cancer research, develop more sustainable ways of producing food and energy, expand access to knowledge, and help solve problems that have resisted us for generations. I find it difficult to justify sacrificing those possibilities simply to preserve the way we currently earn a living.
The difficulty is that there is no obvious way to separate acceptable uses of AI from unacceptable ones. We might welcome a system that advances scientific research while objecting when the same capabilities replace analysts, administrators, or other workers.
Progress in one field can also disrupt employment in another. Someone would have to decide which benefits justify that disruption, which jobs deserve protection, and how much innovation society should forgo. Even if we agreed on those judgments today, new applications would make those boundaries harder to maintain tomorrow.
There is also the question of whether such restrictions could endure. The impulse to invent, explore, and overcome limitations is as much a part of human nature as the pursuit of wealth or status. Nations, businesses, and research institutions would have powerful incentives to continue developing AI, particularly if their competitors were doing so. This path might preserve familiar forms of employment, but it would also require us to deliberately constrain a technology whose greatest benefits we have yet to discover.
The Third Path: Reconsider What Liberty Requires
That leaves the possibility I find most uncomfortable. We continue developing AI, accept that substantial labor displacement may occur, and reconsider how people obtain the resources necessary to live. Some form of guaranteed income, broader ownership of productive technology, or another mechanism may be required.
I recognize that not every form of income support constitutes socialism, and I do not claim to know which approach would work best. But the deeper question is philosophical, not merely political. An economy built around the expectation that people earn their own living may have to confront a future in which opportunities to do so become increasingly scarce through no failure of individual effort.
My instinct is to resist any arrangement that makes people more dependent on government. Yet the freedom to support oneself presupposes a meaningful opportunity to do so. Keynes imagined technological progress relieving humanity of much of its economic burden. We may achieve something resembling that ambition while retaining an economic system that requires most people to sell their labor to survive. We could make work less necessary without making workers any less dependent on having work.
Considering greater economic intervention does not mean that replacing corporate power with government authority eliminates the human appetite for wealth, power, and control. Governments are no more immune to corruption than corporations, regardless of the virtues their political ideologies claim to represent. Changing the institutions that distribute resources does not change the human beings who operate them.
My instincts are closer to subsidiarity, the principle that individuals and smaller communities should address problems within their capacity, with larger institutions stepping in when necessary. That could mean exploring local cooperatives that own AI tools, community land trusts, or regional funds that share the gains from automation rather than assuming any response must come from a central government. I want people to retain as much freedom and responsibility over their lives as possible.
But if the means of earning a living become unavailable to large numbers of people, the problem may exceed what individuals or local communities can solve. Accepting that possibility would not require me to abandon liberty as a value. It would require me to question whether the institutions I have preferred can still protect it.
Of course, new occupations may emerge, and the scale of displacement remains uncertain. Yet I believe AI has the potential to fundamentally disrupt the relationship between human labor and economic independence. Whether that disruption unfolds as dramatically as I have suggested remains to be seen, but the possibility alone forces me to reconsider economic and political convictions I have long held.
What Are We Willing to Surrender?
The first path asks businesses to sacrifice potential profits to preserve employment. The second asks us to restrain our impulse to invent and discover. The third asks us to reconsider how much institutional dependence we are willing to accept in order to preserve economic independence. Each presents a different kind of sacrifice, raising difficult questions about what we value and what we are willing to give up.
I remain hopeful about what AI could make possible, and deeply uneasy about the society we might build around it. I have no desire to surrender my belief in individual liberty, but I am beginning to question whether the economic arrangements I have long defended will remain capable of protecting it. Perhaps the real test of our convictions is whether we can recognize when the means we have chosen no longer serve the ends we value.
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What are we willing to sacrifice for AI? was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.