AI — Artificial Intelligence — has been in the news a lot recently. Possibly this is because the powers-that-be and so-called world leaders seem to exhibit so little of the natural kind. That purportedly being the case, a regular reader of this blog began asking questions of AI (who better to ask?) about what people who have always worked for a living or who expected to have to work for a living are going to do when AI has taken all the jobs, the Universal Basic Income bites the dust, and the government can no longer fund welfare or even Social Security.
The response came in the form of an open letter to “the Generation Facing the Machines and AI” and ran (more or less) as follows —
To the Generation Facing the Machines and AI:
You didn’t ask for a world where algorithms decide your worth, where robots threaten your job, and where your future feels like a spreadsheet. But here you are — trying to build a life in a system that often sees you as replaceable.
Every labor negotiation is more than a transaction. It’s a moral reckoning. When human work is reduced to a commodity—something to be bought and sold like data — we strip away dignity and fracture the foundation of a just society. We become two camps: one trying to buy labor cheap, and the other forced to sell its soul dearly.
And now, with AI and robotics accelerating that divide, the stakes are even higher. This isn’t just about jobs — it’s about meaning. About whether your life will be defined by contribution or consumption. About whether your spirit will be nurtured or neglected.
But there’s a way forward a Just Third Way.
When labor — you — are willing to assume the responsibility of ownership, and when capital is willing to share that ownership with those it serves, then we begin to restore something deeper than property. We restore the means of production and the property of being human. We reclaim the right to serve each other for the common good.
This isn’t just economic reform. It’s a cultural revival. A chance to build a system where technology amplifies humanity instead of replacing it. Where work is valued not just for its utility, but for the lives it sustains and the souls it keeps.
You are not just the future workforce. You are the future stewards. And the world you build will reflect the values you demand.
OWN or be OWNED
Okay, we thought this was a pretty good letter, even though it was anonymous. (Usually, anonymous letters turn out to be poison pen type missives; this was, uh, more of a benevolent billet doux — if that’s how you spell it.) It (the letter) however did leave out a few details. It only hinted as to why someone might not want to sell one’s soul and why a spirit should be nurtured instead of neglected and what the values one might demand might be.
It also seemed to suggest that labor is the only legitimate way to gain income . . . which we know with absolute certainty is not the opinion of the anonymous (to you) writer of the letter. The fact is, the only real solution to the “problem” of AI is not to give human labor some mystical status, but to empower every child, woman, and man to own the machines — and the AI — that are displacing human beings as suppliers of labor from the production process.
As suppliers of labor, yes, but not suppliers of ownership. Not everyone can labor, but anyone, even an artificial person, can own. All it takes is the proper legal framework and access to the opportunity and means to become an owner, and that means access to money and credit (as we’ve discussed many times on this blog). As ESOP-inventor Louis O. Kelso said in less-politically correct or woke days, he could build ownership into a wooden Indian.
(Once upon a time, high-end tobacconists had wooden statues of Native Americans holding various tobacco-products as an advertising sign to indicate the wares inside were of such good quality they would satisfy even such connoisseurs. The point, of course, is not that Native Americans are more adept at destroying their lungs than people of European descent, but that anybody can own, even a statue . . . so long as the law allows for it.)
And that is the point of the Economic Democracy Act. The EDA (as we fondly and informally refer to it) is designed to make it possible for everyone to become an owner of capital without first having to be rich, and without redistributing what already belongs to others. But that still begs the question: Why would anyone want to be a capital owner, when one could get a job, UBI, or welfare?
The letter-writer hinted at the answer: “This isn’t just about jobs — it’s about meaning. About whether your life will be defined by contribution or consumption. About whether your spirit will be nurtured or neglected.” In other words, it’s about the meaning and purpose of life.
. . . which is?
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| Aristotle |
According to Aristotle and those of his philosophical school (as well as quite a few others . . . at least as corrected by Aquinas, Maimonides, Ibn Khaldûn, etc.), the meaning and purpose of life is to become more fully human, that is, to become better at what God or Nature (or whatever) made you, i.e., to conform to your natural being.
Admittedly, this can get a little deep, for persons such as human beings have determinable characteristics while non-persons have determinate characteristics. That means human beings have to acquire and develop humanness (“virtue” — the habit of doing good, that is, of conforming to nature), while non-persons are what they are without having to work at it. Since human beings have to work to become more fully human, they require power to do so, for “power” is defined as “the ability for doing,” and as Daniel Webster said, “Power naturally and necessarily follows property.”
Consequently, if you don’t have power, you can’t as a rule become virtuous; this is why Aristotle called nominally free people who didn’t own capital, “masterless slaves.” A rather crude, even raw way of putting it, but pithy. William Cobbett said the same thing a few millennia later, that if you don’t own property (capital) and you are not secure in that ownership, “you may call yourself what you will, but you are a slave.”
So, the only real answer to the advance of machines and the development of AI is for as many as possible of the people to own the machines and the AI — for as Kelso observed, ownership means control in all codes of law. The bottom line is that advancing technology is only a threat if we let it — and the way to let it become and remain a threat is to fail to adopt the Economic Democracy Act as soon as possible.
#30#
