I've been thinking a lot about the impact of AI on the job market recently, and as a result, I ended up reading quite a few papers/articles on the threat that AI poses to capitalism. However, the more I read, the more it seemed to me that the authors of these papers were missing a key assumption in their proposed solutions to this issue - that every positive outcome, for capitalism for for humanity, is predicated first on the alignment of AI to the best interests of humankind.
The Threat to Capitalism
With the meteoric rise of AI over the past few years, many people have expressed worry over the future of capitalism, and for good reason. As AI displaces workers through automation, wealth is already beginning to concentrate towards those with AI assets. This rising wealth inequality is further exacerbated by a growing class of workers finding their skillsets have become de-valued due to AI-fueled supply.
The impact of AI on job markets is observable already, with employment for entry level software developers and customer service representatives falling by 20% from 2022 to 2025.[1] It's not hard to point to AI as the cause of this contraction. When comparing tech jobs against the rest of the economy, we actually start to see a stark split: total US jobs are at an all time high, while tech jobs have actually lost 11% overall since 2022.[2]
The tension between capitalism and AI rises out of the basic incentive structure that capitalism creates for businesses. In the free market, consumers will (mostly) optimize for price; if I can get the same product for cheaper, I will. This creates a competitive hiring dynamic for employers - if a company can hire cheaper employees and still produce goods of the same quality, this allows them to lower prices, driving more consumers to buy the company's product over competitors. This is, of course, a gross simplification of market dynamics, but it captures the essence of the tension at play here.
This is where AI comes in. For all the literature written on making AI an augment to humans in the workforce rather than replacing jobs - the brute fact remains that an employer deciding between human and AI employees must either choose the cheaper option or surrender their leading market position to someone else who is willing to do so. In other words, the problem is not our values surrounding how we should or shouldn't use AI, it is the fact that our basic economic system selects for those that use it in a particular way, irrespective of our personal convictions.
This bleak realization is what has driven various researchers and economists to put forward a few solutions. This topic itself deserves its own essay, so I'll simply describe a few options with links to better sources for those interested.
Redistribution (UBI/Wealth Funds/Windfall): This encompasses a variety of strategies like UBI or a national dividend / wealth fund, but generally these approaches boil down to taxing AI operation and broadly re-distributing proceeds. [3][4][5]
Pre-distribution / Worker Ownership: Focuses on mitigating inequality by distributing access/ownership to AI tools prior to market activity - think open source, public AI servicing, etc. [6][7][8]
Of all of these, I find the formulation of pre-distribution described in 6 to be the most compelling. In my opinion, providing equal access to AI tools will preserve individual incentives to work, whereas unearned distribution seems to actually disincentivize workers and reduce overall morale.
A Reformulation of the Problem
What really concerns me, far more than the fate of capitalism, is the gradual erosion of the agency of human beings. The crown jewel of AI research, rather than mere intelligence, is agency. Intelligence is great, yes, but it is not the end goal; we want intelligence that has tools, that is embodied, that can bring things about on our behalf.
And indeed - we're making good progress! Even over the past year, type of task that I'm willing to delegate to AI when developing software has changed significantly: I've moved rather quickly from reading AI contributions line-by-line to letting it handle whole features. The broader landscape reflects this as well: we started with AI that can write essays in 2022, to AI that can pair program in 2023, to AI that can spin up MVPs or small projects in 2024, to AI that can run it's own vending machine in 2025.[9] It's relatively easy to extrapolate onward from here - to a software developer, then maybe a product team, then to blue-collar jobs when robotics advances, onward and upward. I will grant that this progression requires many assumptions, but any barriers or roadblocks to this future that I can imagine seem temporary and inconsequential in the long run.
I say this not to fear-monger, but to be pragmatic about the risks we're facing if AI goes as well as we hope. My main point here is that the issue isn't simply wealth inequality. There may be a day when 50% of workers have found their jobs displaced and the top 1% is surfing a tidal wave of AI profit - and certainly wealth inequality will be a pressing issue during that time - but this is just a step on the long (fingers crossed) road to the complete eclipse of human agency, because this is what we seem to be working for, after all. In the end, there is no insurmountable gap in replacability between you and I and anyone else. If I will be replaced by AI one day, I would wager that Sam Altman will not be far behind.
You may object - "What of the systems and principles that we mentioned just before? Surely, if we play our cards right and implement UBI or pre-distribution or whatever it may be perfectly - there's hope!?" And I would actually agree - I think that if we manage AI well, the potential for the betterment of humankind is great. I think of Keynes' 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren"[10] or Amodei's "Machines of Loving Grace"[11] as visions of how everything can play out in a way that benefits humanity.
However, in both scenarios, the elephant in the room is this: we are no longer in the driver's seat. The threat further down the road is not inequality between human beings, it is inequality between human beings and AI.
There's a reason that "seize the means of production" became a battle cry for Marxists in the 19th century, and it's the same reason I think we should think carefully about how we plan on employing AI. As AI agency grows, there will pass a point of no return upon which we will have willingly ceded the means of production. I don't want to wait until then to think about where the ship is sailing.
Alignment as the Focus
This brings me to my central point, and I'll make it a short one.
Currently it seems like the direction of the vast majority of AI development is targeted towards human replacement in the long run. I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, it simply seems to be the case when I look at advancements in agentic harnesses, robotics, and frontier models, or when I read the grand visions of the leading minds in AI.
This doesn't necessarily have to play out poorly - the thing that separates Amodei's Machines of Loving Grace from 2001: A Space Odyssey is not the presence of powerful AI, but its values. The same capability pointed in different directions creates radically different futures - and the direction isn't decided by the capability. It's decided by us, now, in the way we build and train these systems.
This is what makes alignment the central concern rather than a peripheral one. Focusing on capitalism, or the job market, or inherent bias within AI certainly isn't a bad thing to do, but we must keep in mind that none of these solutions will matter if we don't get alignment right first. Today, we have found ourselves alive during a slim window of opportunity wherein we still have the agency to influence how this all plays out, long after we're gone. If we plan on abdicating so much of our agency as human beings, or even if there's a small risk of that, we need to be taking alignment more seriously, not just at AI companies, but as a society.
I've been thinking a lot about the impact of AI on the job market recently, and as a result, I ended up reading quite a few papers/articles on the threat that AI poses to capitalism. However, the more I read, the more it seemed to me that the authors of these papers were missing a key assumption in their proposed solutions to this issue - that every positive outcome, for capitalism for for humanity, is predicated first on the alignment of AI to the best interests of humankind.
The Threat to Capitalism
With the meteoric rise of AI over the past few years, many people have expressed worry over the future of capitalism, and for good reason. As AI displaces workers through automation, wealth is already beginning to concentrate towards those with AI assets. This rising wealth inequality is further exacerbated by a growing class of workers finding their skillsets have become de-valued due to AI-fueled supply.
The impact of AI on job markets is observable already, with employment for entry level software developers and customer service representatives falling by 20% from 2022 to 2025.[1] It's not hard to point to AI as the cause of this contraction. When comparing tech jobs against the rest of the economy, we actually start to see a stark split: total US jobs are at an all time high, while tech jobs have actually lost 11% overall since 2022.[2]
The tension between capitalism and AI rises out of the basic incentive structure that capitalism creates for businesses. In the free market, consumers will (mostly) optimize for price; if I can get the same product for cheaper, I will. This creates a competitive hiring dynamic for employers - if a company can hire cheaper employees and still produce goods of the same quality, this allows them to lower prices, driving more consumers to buy the company's product over competitors. This is, of course, a gross simplification of market dynamics, but it captures the essence of the tension at play here.
This is where AI comes in. For all the literature written on making AI an augment to humans in the workforce rather than replacing jobs - the brute fact remains that an employer deciding between human and AI employees must either choose the cheaper option or surrender their leading market position to someone else who is willing to do so. In other words, the problem is not our values surrounding how we should or shouldn't use AI, it is the fact that our basic economic system selects for those that use it in a particular way, irrespective of our personal convictions.
This bleak realization is what has driven various researchers and economists to put forward a few solutions. This topic itself deserves its own essay, so I'll simply describe a few options with links to better sources for those interested.
Of all of these, I find the formulation of pre-distribution described in 6 to be the most compelling. In my opinion, providing equal access to AI tools will preserve individual incentives to work, whereas unearned distribution seems to actually disincentivize workers and reduce overall morale.
A Reformulation of the Problem
What really concerns me, far more than the fate of capitalism, is the gradual erosion of the agency of human beings. The crown jewel of AI research, rather than mere intelligence, is agency. Intelligence is great, yes, but it is not the end goal; we want intelligence that has tools, that is embodied, that can bring things about on our behalf.
And indeed - we're making good progress! Even over the past year, type of task that I'm willing to delegate to AI when developing software has changed significantly: I've moved rather quickly from reading AI contributions line-by-line to letting it handle whole features. The broader landscape reflects this as well: we started with AI that can write essays in 2022, to AI that can pair program in 2023, to AI that can spin up MVPs or small projects in 2024, to AI that can run it's own vending machine in 2025.[9] It's relatively easy to extrapolate onward from here - to a software developer, then maybe a product team, then to blue-collar jobs when robotics advances, onward and upward. I will grant that this progression requires many assumptions, but any barriers or roadblocks to this future that I can imagine seem temporary and inconsequential in the long run.
I say this not to fear-monger, but to be pragmatic about the risks we're facing if AI goes as well as we hope. My main point here is that the issue isn't simply wealth inequality. There may be a day when 50% of workers have found their jobs displaced and the top 1% is surfing a tidal wave of AI profit - and certainly wealth inequality will be a pressing issue during that time - but this is just a step on the long (fingers crossed) road to the complete eclipse of human agency, because this is what we seem to be working for, after all. In the end, there is no insurmountable gap in replacability between you and I and anyone else. If I will be replaced by AI one day, I would wager that Sam Altman will not be far behind.
You may object - "What of the systems and principles that we mentioned just before? Surely, if we play our cards right and implement UBI or pre-distribution or whatever it may be perfectly - there's hope!?" And I would actually agree - I think that if we manage AI well, the potential for the betterment of humankind is great. I think of Keynes' 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren"[10] or Amodei's "Machines of Loving Grace"[11] as visions of how everything can play out in a way that benefits humanity.
However, in both scenarios, the elephant in the room is this: we are no longer in the driver's seat. The threat further down the road is not inequality between human beings, it is inequality between human beings and AI.
There's a reason that "seize the means of production" became a battle cry for Marxists in the 19th century, and it's the same reason I think we should think carefully about how we plan on employing AI. As AI agency grows, there will pass a point of no return upon which we will have willingly ceded the means of production. I don't want to wait until then to think about where the ship is sailing.
Alignment as the Focus
This brings me to my central point, and I'll make it a short one.
Currently it seems like the direction of the vast majority of AI development is targeted towards human replacement in the long run. I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, it simply seems to be the case when I look at advancements in agentic harnesses, robotics, and frontier models, or when I read the grand visions of the leading minds in AI.
This doesn't necessarily have to play out poorly - the thing that separates Amodei's Machines of Loving Grace from 2001: A Space Odyssey is not the presence of powerful AI, but its values. The same capability pointed in different directions creates radically different futures - and the direction isn't decided by the capability. It's decided by us, now, in the way we build and train these systems.
This is what makes alignment the central concern rather than a peripheral one. Focusing on capitalism, or the job market, or inherent bias within AI certainly isn't a bad thing to do, but we must keep in mind that none of these solutions will matter if we don't get alignment right first. Today, we have found ourselves alive during a slim window of opportunity wherein we still have the agency to influence how this all plays out, long after we're gone. If we plan on abdicating so much of our agency as human beings, or even if there's a small risk of that, we need to be taking alignment more seriously, not just at AI companies, but as a society.