Power and Progress

The prevailing economic narrative suggests that technological advancements naturally lift all boats by increasing overall productivity. Historical evidence contradicts this assumption. During the early Industrial Revolution, the introduction of power looms enriched factory owners while the artisans they replaced suffered through stagnant wages and brutal working conditions. It took over a century of labor organizing and institutional changes for the benefits of industrialization to reach the broader working class.

The invention of the cotton gin dramatically improved the efficiency of processing upland cotton, but its social consequences were catastrophic. Rather than easing human labor, the technology incentivized a massive expansion of the plantation system across the American South. Plantation owners forcibly relocated enslaved people to meet the new demand, intensifying a system of brutal exploitation to generate vast wealth for a narrow elite. The technology itself was agnostic, but the power structures dictating its use weaponized it against a vulnerable population.

Modern economies frequently deploy technologies designed solely to replace human labor without offering substantial leaps in productivity. Self-checkout kiosks in grocery stores force customers to perform unpaid labor while reducing the number of employed cashiers. This type of implementation shifts power and capital from labor to management, stalling economic growth while hollowing out the middle class. When artificial intelligence is used merely to generate mediocre written content or replace customer service representatives, it replicates this exact pattern of displacement without meaningful advancement.

The tech industry currently fixates on achieving autonomous machine intelligence, explicitly designing algorithms to replicate and replace human capabilities. A far more beneficial trajectory involves prioritizing machine usefulness, which focuses on creating tools that expand what human workers can achieve. When Henry Ford electrified the automotive assembly line, the process automated certain tasks but ultimately generated hundreds of thousands of new roles for workers. Directing artificial intelligence to aid medical professionals or assist educators would similarly expand human capabilities rather than rendering human workers obsolete.

The distribution of wealth generated by new inventions depends entirely on which groups hold societal power. During the three decades following World War Two, robust trade unions and strong social safety nets ensured that the financial gains of new manufacturing technologies were widely shared among the working class. Starting in the late twentieth century, the erosion of these institutions allowed technology executives and corporate shareholders to capture almost all the financial benefits of the digital revolution. Reversing this trend requires building countervailing powers, such as modern labor movements and civil society organizations, to challenge the dominance of corporate narratives.

The argument that elites systematically steer technology to impoverish workers faces intense scrutiny. Critics point out that many technologies labeled as failures of shared prosperity actually sustain billions of human lives globally. Furthermore, recent economic data contradicts the claim that the digital age is an era of unending wage stagnation. Since the widespread introduction of predictive and generative artificial intelligence, real wages for production workers have risen strongly, and prime age employment has reached historic highs.

Proposals to tax or regulate technologies based on whether they replace or augment labor assume that policymakers can accurately predict a technology's economic impact in advance. In reality, the line between task automation and task creation is blurry and highly unpredictable. Early estimates suggested artificial intelligence would rapidly replace medical radiologists, but demand for human radiologists actually surged as the new tools came online. Attempting to filter technological development through government panels could easily stall critical innovations while failing to prevent the negative labor market disruptions it seeks to avoid.