The AI Surplus

When five people can do the work of a hundred, the productive capacity of the workforce has multiplied twentyfold and the surplus must go somewhere. It can flow to workers as reduced hours at maintained wages, to owners as increased profits, or to displacement — reducing the workforce to one-twentieth of its previous size and capturing the surplus as cost savings. Gorz argued that the first option was the only one compatible with human liberation, and that the market's natural tendency toward the second and third required political structures to counteract. The history of every prior technological revolution confirms this: productivity gains are initially concentrated in the hands of those who control the new technology and are redistributed only through decades of political struggle.