Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a labor issue. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it will prove to be a marginal labor issue. Or maybe it will prove to be an existential, epochal labor issue on par with industrialization or globalization, each of which revolutionized their own eras of work. Before we get completely immersed in the battle over how AI will affect workers, though, it is important to frame the playing field correctly. This is not a fight between a backward-looking labor movement on one side and technological progress on the other. Rather, this is a question of where the wealth and efficiency gains created by AI will flow.

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It is easy to cast the workers of today bristling against the intrusions of AI as just the latest iteration of a very old story. They are the mythical Luddites smashing looms out of ignorance; they are the grumpy artisans displaced by the wondrous productivity of factories; they are the horse-and-buggy drivers unwilling to acknowledge the supremacy of automobiles. This is an attractive story from the perspective of capital. It views technological change as an almost biological process, a march toward progress ushered along by the helpful business people who rearrange society for greater efficiency and reap the just rewards for their cleverness.