We are worried about AI and mass middle class unemployment. Here's the worry:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/opinion/ai-labor-work-force-silicon-valley.html.
And well we should worry. In the end all innovations produce new jobs, just different jobs from those that were displaced. Neoliberalism, it's called, let the market take care of it. That was the thinking about open trade and offshoring – what would happen to the American workers who would be displaced? Eventually, other jobs would open up. But that's long term. “Eventually.” But without planning for the government to step in and help, affirmatively finding ways to help on the way to “eventually,” we saw a we see a lot of wasteland.
Imagine a farmer about 100 or 200 or 500 years ago. Farming is tough, morning to night, all the work of growing crops, and the other kinds of farming, ranching, working the land. Backbreaking work. I bet some of those farmers long ago thought, what if there were machines that could do this work? What if we had machines to plant, machines to water, machines to fertilize, machines to pick, etc. What if we farmers could just use those machines to do this repetitive muscular work, and we farmers could just watch and supervise the machines? Would that be a great life, or what?
And then, in time, the machines appeared. It would actually be possible for farmers to do just that, just what they wished they could do. But, the world being perverse as it is, instead of their living a relaxed life on the farm, the forces of capitalism took over, and companies owned the machines, and companies owned larger and larger amounts of the land, and the processing plants, etc. What happened to those dreamy farmers? Why, those families were displaced, and they had to find other lines of work. Their lands were more fertile than ever, the work was physically easier than ever, but the proceeds flowed to others than the dreaming farmer.
What would have been better? It would have been better if the farmers could have been cut in on the deal. It would have been better if the farmers had not been displaced, if they had some ownership of the new entities that worked the land, so that they could remain in the small towns where they lived, where they could have had more relaxed lives, where they could have pursued lives of contentment right where they came from, so that they could then find other work. If they had been cut into the deal, they could have gotten more educated, perhaps, and things would happen there in their home towns because they would have money, and where there are people with money, enterprises spring up. It's a question of how the wealth that comes from progress is distributed.
If you are coding for computers, it's not unlike the farmers. Work, work, work, and why can't machines do that? The knowledge is inside my head, can't it be operationalized in machines? Then I could relax some, let the machine do it, and I would have some free time, or the ability to do something else. The output would be the same or better, but the work put into it would be less.
But this time, it's not just the coders who are like the farmers, it's a whole lot more of society, where the jobs done can be done by AI instead. The gross product of the nation, if it is ranked in terms of good and services and not in terms of money-value assigned to those goods and services, is increased. But who benefits? It's a question of distribution.
Not everything is solved by markets and capitalism. Somehow, we have to find a way that resources (money) are distributed to people at large, not just to a small band of owners. We have to weaken that tight link between work and income. We are very bad at doing that now. Our prosperous society has a concentration of wealth at the top, and huge swaths of the nation are strapped, living paycheck to paycheck, or without a place to live, or are food insecure. We hae a severe problem of maldistribution.
That's the problem. Our floor need to be not a cold concrete basement floor, but a soft and forgiving and pleasant upstairs floor. We need a higher level of the lower floor of society. Not that it's easy to design, but so many other countries do a better job of it than we do.
We should not stop innovating. Productivity and prosperity are good. We just have to find the way to distribute our prosperity so that everyone benefits from it, so that it's not arrogated by the wealthy few. Leaving it “to the market,” making it “someone else's problem,” would be a very stupid thing to do.
Budd Shenkin
