AI and jobs
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Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “godfather of AI,” said artificial intelligence will spark a surge in unemployment and profits.
“What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,” Hinton said in September. “It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.”
Ive seen so many of these types of commentaries on the internet predicting a jobless future- tech fantasies from the likes of Musk and co. Little or no consideration is given to the point that if employment falls to near zero, workers aren’t gonna have the wages to buy the stuff that the system is trying to sell them.
Does anyone seriously believe capitalism is gonna commit Harakiri?
Apparently, yes…Hinton is right to say that the problem is not the technology itself but the economic system that deploys it. Artificial intelligence, like every major advance in productivity, is introduced under capitalism to cut labour costs and increase profits, not to liberate people from drudgery. The predictable result is greater insecurity, deeper inequality and rising poverty for the majority.
However, many of the predictions about a “jobless future” ignore a basic contradiction at the heart of capitalism. The system depends on workers not only to produce wealth, but also to buy the goods and services that are produced. If employment were to fall close to zero, where would mass purchasing power come from? Who would realise profits?
The idea that capitalism could automate most production and still function smoothly is a fantasy. It would amount to a system undermining its own foundations. Capitalism cannot abolish labour without abolishing itself.
History suggests something different. Every wave of automation has not eliminated work, but restructured it, displaced workers, created new forms of precarious employment and intensified exploitation, while periodically triggering crises. Technology is used to defend profitability, not to meet human needs.
The real issue is not whether AI will destroy jobs, but who controls the technology and for what purpose. In a system organised around human need, automation would mean shorter working lives and more freedom. In a system organised around profit, it means insecurity for the many and enormous gains for the few.
The problem is not AI.
The problem is the system that puts it at the service of profit.The idea that capitalism could automate most production and still function smoothly is a fantasy. It would amount to a system undermining its own foundations. Capitalism cannot abolish labour without abolishing itself.
Spot on. And capitalism is not going to abolish itself. Nor are the capitalist class going to abolish themselves.
It makes me wonder what lies behind the thinking of people like Musk with his crazed talk of a jobless future. How is he and his fellow parasites going to survive without a steady stream of surplus value that only living labour can generate?
I suspect that what will happen is that, as unit costs decline, this will increase the tendency for capital to become concentrated and centralised. More and more small businesses will be squeezed out. Oligopolies or monopolies are less subject to market competition and have a freer hand when it comes to price setting.
This will have a counteracting effect on the tendency for the rate of profit to fall as a result of automation etc. But maintaining prices in the face of falling unit costs still presupposes a level of paying demand that is sufficient to buy what is being produced. In other words, mass employment
Could this lead to a slowdown in the rate of technological innovation in the future when we reach such a point? Or could it mean something else? If so, what?
Apart from that, there are several major institutions — including the World Economic Forum, the IMF, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — explicitly predict that AI will increase, not reduce, employment in many sectors, even while transforming or displacing some tasks.
Exactly. Capitalism will not commit suicide, nor will the capitalist class willingly undermine the conditions of its own existence. The idea that the system will simply “automate itself out of existence” misunderstands how capitalism actually works.
Figures like Musk indulge in fantasies about a jobless future, but they never explain how profits would be realised in such a world. Without a mass of workers receiving wages, there is no effective demand, no market, and no source of surplus value. Capital does not reproduce itself through machines alone; only living labour creates new value. A fully automated capitalism is therefore not a future system but a contradiction in terms.
What is more likely is not the disappearance of capitalism but its further concentration. As unit costs fall through automation, smaller firms are squeezed out, while larger corporations consolidate their dominance. We already see this in the rise of oligopolies and quasi-monopolies in tech, finance, logistics, and energy. These giants are less exposed to competitive pressure and gain greater power to influence prices, markets, and even states themselves.
This concentration can partially offset falling profit rates, but it does not abolish the underlying contradictions. Profit still ultimately depends on a sufficiently employed working class capable of buying what is produced. That is why capitalism constantly oscillates between technological expansion and social restraint: it wants productivity without unemployment, automation without collapsing demand.
The idea that this could lead to a slowdown in innovation is plausible. If profitability, market stability, or social control require limiting disruption, investment in certain technologies may be delayed, redirected, or politically managed. Innovation under capitalism is never driven by human need but by profitability.
It is also telling that institutions like the IMF, WEF, and US labor authorities predict that AI will reshape work rather than eliminate it. Historically, new technologies have not abolished wage labour; they have reorganised it, intensified it, and often made it more precarious. Capitalism adapts. It always has.
The real problem, then, is not whether AI will destroy employment, but that as long as production remains organised for profit rather than for need, every technological advance will be used in the interests of capital accumulation, not human emancipation. Without a conscious move beyond the wage-labour system itself, the future will be one of continued exploitation — whether mediated by algorithms or factory foremen.From a socialist perspective, AI is not the problem — capitalism is. Under capitalism, technology is used to cut costs, increase exploitation, and concentrate wealth. That is why every advance in automation generates fear: fear of unemployment, insecurity, and loss of control. The technology itself is neutral; its social use is not.
In a genuinely socialist society — based on common ownership, democratic control, and production for use — AI would be a powerful ally. Instead of threatening livelihoods, automation would free people from unnecessary and exhausting labour. The aim would not be to replace workers to raise profits, but to reduce the total amount of labour society needs to perform.
AI could help plan production according to real human needs, optimise the use of resources, eliminate wasteful duplication, improve healthcare, education and infrastructure, and allow people more free time to develop creatively and socially. The goal would be abundance and freedom, not efficiency for profit.
What capitalism presents as a danger — a future with less work — would become one of socialism’s greatest achievements: more leisure, more autonomy, and more human flourishing.
The tragedy is not that AI exists, but that such powerful tools remain trapped inside a system that uses them against the interests of the majority.
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