Who Should Own the Robots?

AI’s displacement of workers will make it even harder to organize labor—and all the more necessary.

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........

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