A person (not AI) wrote this column, because people are still the future of Maine's economy

URL SCAN: A person (not AI) wrote this column, because people are still the future of Maine's economy
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The Dissection

This is a Labor Day labor-preservation brief. It gathers useful transition tools—benefits, training, cash assistance, navigators, and public employment—and relabels them as a strategy for making people the future of the economy. It never confronts AI ownership, substitution, or the collapse of mass human labor demand.

The Core Fallacy

It confuses keeping people economically supported and attached to work with keeping them economically necessary. Safety nets can prevent immediate deprivation. Training can fill temporary shortages. Neither defeats P1, P2, or P3. If AI performs cognitive work more cheaply and effectively, public investment delays or cushions displacement; it does not restore the wage-to-consumption circuit. “In-demand jobs” are treated as permanent categories when automation changes the demand itself.

Hidden Assumptions

• Human labor will remain necessary at scale.
• Education can convert displaced workers into complementary workers faster than AI erases the roles.
• Maine can preserve durable human-only economic domains despite competitive pressure.
• Welfare improvements imply productive participation rather than managed dependency.
• State and federal institutions will retain the fiscal capacity to fund the promises.
• Investing in workforce intermediaries addresses the ownership problem.

The claim that “nothing replaces” investment in workers is especially revealing: under the thesis, AI replaces precisely the cognitive and administrative functions many such systems depend on.

Social Function

Transition management fused with ideological anesthetic; partial truth. These policies may reduce hardship and preserve social stability during the transition. They are a parachute, not an engine. The column protects the existing workforce-support ecosystem while avoiding the question of who owns and controls the machines.

The Verdict

The column does not refute obsolescence. It asks government to make obsolescence less violent and less visible. People may remain central as consumers, dependents, political subjects, and providers of lagging physical or care work. Under DT, that is not the same as being the productive future. Without ownership of AI capital or indispensable Servitor status, this is management of wage capitalism’s corpse—not a replacement for its dead mechanism.