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 …