The new Luddites want you to pay
An AI system that does your job badly is a joke. One that does it well is apparently a social emergency. Between those verdicts lies the modern Luddite’s economic programme: the machine may improve until the customer can do without me. Then somebody must call the government. The sacred principle is that you keep paying.
The demand that AI must “augment” workers but never replace them grants innovation a licence to be useful, provided it remains sufficiently useless. Software may help produce the report. It must never become good enough to dispense with the person producing it. A worker redeployed to something useful contributes to the gain. A compulsory passenger adds to the bill. The washing machine would have faced the same test: excellent invention, comrade, but the washerwoman must remain beside it, supervising the spin cycle for ideological correctness.
The customer who cannot afford a lawyer might welcome an equally reliable service at a fraction of the cost. An absolute ban on replacement can deny that possibility to protect the incumbent’s income. Observe the compassion. The poorer person must go without so the more expensive person need not compete. The poor can have solidarity. Legal help remains extra.
The original Luddites had a comprehensible grievance: machines threatened their livelihoods. Their losses did not establish a public obligation to preserve their production methods. Their modern counterparts can inflict the same obstruction through regulation, with no hammer and considerably better stationery. The intellectual advance consists of calling the obstruction an ethical framework. A vandal with a consultation paper is still asking everybody else to live with the damage.
Customers want results. Labour saved on one task can be used to meet another need. Insisting that the old labour requirement survive consumes resources that could have served somebody else. A restaurant could employ more people by banning dishwashers and handing the kitchen staff toothbrushes. At dinner, this makes you an idiot. At a policy conference, it makes you the keynote speaker.
Marx did not say every tedious activity deserves an everlasting salary. His labour theory of value concerned socially necessary labour, distinguished value from usefulness and allowed for rising productivity. Invoking a revolutionary to freeze the existing division of labour is quite a tribute: overthrow capitalism, but please preserve my job description.
The commies demanding that nobody be replaced have devised something more embarrassing: politically necessary labour. The job can be done without you, but the payroll requires a ceremonial human. Workers of the world, unite: the software has written the report and you must spend Thursday pretending. After all that revolutionary foreplay, the demand is that nobody touch your precious invoice. Seize the means of billing.
Marx’s proposal for state control would still leave somebody paying for unnecessary work. Officials must choose who gets protected and who pays. A profession that captures their sympathy can protect its income while distributing the cost among people with less influence. Give the commissar a monopoly and the customer gains another person whose permission is required. Public ownership offers no immunity from producer privilege. The same racket can operate on official letterhead.
A degree does not oblige customers to keep paying for work a machine can do just as well. Expertise earns its keep by improving outcomes. If human judgment catches errors, sustains trust or supplies something software cannot, customers have reasons to pay for it. An expert who insists on payment regardless of the contribution is making a much less impressive claim. The customer is being asked to fund the expert’s self-esteem.
AI vendors deserve no indulgence either. A machine that produces fluent bullshit may cost more to supervise than it saves. Compare reliability, supervision and total cost before claiming an improvement. An absolute prohibition on replacement refuses that comparison: the human must remain whatever the evidence says. The supposedly thoughtful position has made thought unnecessary. It is quite an achievement to lecture machines about intelligence while demanding exemption from a test of usefulness.
Junior hiring gives neither camp a victory parade. Analysis of Seek advertisements reported by the Australian Financial Review found gains in some occupations where AI complements workers. Advertisements were weaker in human resources, software development and law, where more tasks can be automated. The changes were generally small and the evidence preliminary. They warrant caution about sweeping employment forecasts. Anyone confidently announcing universal prosperity or universal ruin is selling certainty the evidence cannot supply.
Cheaper services can attract new customers. A junior employee using AI may perform work previously reserved for a senior colleague. Both developments can support hiring, while other tasks disappear. An “augmentation only” rule prejudges which adjustments are permissible before firms and customers discover what works. The lobby is happy to celebrate human ingenuity once ingenuity signs an undertaking to leave the organisation chart alone.
Workers can lose badly while shareholders pocket the gains. Weak competition can allow lower costs to become higher profits instead of lower prices. That makes distribution a serious problem. Destroying the saving leaves less to distribute. Burning the surplus so the capitalist cannot have it is a lousy welfare policy, however exciting the flames look from the revolutionary bookshop. The worker still needs an income when the cheering stops.
Use some of the gains to support displaced workers and help them into other employment. Negotiate transitions where possible. Competition and tax policy can spread the benefits. “Learn to code” is a contemptible answer to someone whose coding job has disappeared; a billionaire’s rising share price is hardly a complete social policy. Keeping unnecessary tasks permanently expensive is another bad answer. Compassion requires doing the difficult work of helping people adjust. A ban lets its advocates congratulate themselves while somebody else pays.
The anti-AI lobby demanding permanent protection should state its offer honestly: higher costs for customers, fewer opportunities for people priced out, and no necessary improvement in the service. If your defence of humanity requires denying other humans a useful, affordable alternative, spare us the halo. You are defending a tollbooth. Put down Marx and explain the charge. Nobody owes you a less capable machine.