If AI Takes The Jobs, Who Gets The Money? - MITechNews

TEXT START: Artificial intelligence could make Michigan businesses dramatically more productive while reducing the number of workers they need.

The Dissection

The article is cataloguing policy-compatible escape routes from the employment-to-consumption crisis without confronting the mechanism that makes them unstable. It correctly identifies the central problem—machines can produce more while workers lose wages—but treats the distribution of that output as an open managerial choice rather than a conflict governed by ownership, competition and bargaining power.

Its proposed solutions are variations of the same delay strategy: create new AI industries, shorten the workweek, raise worker compensation, lower prices, broaden ownership or redistribute income. Each may soften the transition locally. None restores mass labor’s necessity once AI and robotics become cheaper and more capable than human workers across cognitive and physical production.

Michigan manufacturing is presented as a possible refuge. It is not a structural escape. The state may manufacture robots, sensors and power systems, but those industries will themselves be pushed toward automation and capital concentration. Building the machines that displace labor changes Michigan’s position in the supply chain; it does not preserve the wage system.

The Core Fallacy

The article assumes productivity gains can be routed back through workers while the competitive system remains intact. That is the contradiction.

Under the Discontinuity Thesis, P1 makes human labor progressively less necessary. P2 prevents institutions from reliably preserving large human-only economic domains against cheaper machine production. P3 then destroys the productive participation that made wages, consumption and tax revenue mutually reinforcing.

The article repeatedly treats distribution as if it were independent of production. It is not. If firms can achieve the same output with fewer workers, competitive pressure rewards labor reduction, not permanent generosity. A four-day week, higher wages and profit sharing require coordination or bargaining power that the displaced majority will increasingly lack. Training does not solve this; it merely increases the supply of humans competing for a shrinking set of temporarily valuable roles.

The article also mistakes new industrial demand for durable mass employment. AI may create robotics and infrastructure jobs, but the relevant question is not whether new occupations appear. It is whether they absorb the number of workers made economically unnecessary. The article provides no mechanism showing that they will.

Hidden Assumptions

• Firms will voluntarily distribute productivity gains instead of retaining them, cutting labor costs or returning them to owners.
• Productivity-created industries will generate enough jobs to offset the workers displaced by the technology producing those industries.
• Governments can coordinate a stable human employment domain despite firms competing to automate.
• Workers will retain sufficient bargaining power after employers’ dependence on labor declines.
• Technical retraining can convert a mass labor surplus into a mass labor requirement.
• Lower prices can compensate for falling income even where land, housing, energy, healthcare and infrastructure remain scarce.
• Ownership can be broadened before concentrated owners use political and market power to preserve control.
• Tax systems can fund large transfers even as employment, wages and consumption-based revenue weaken.
• A transition can be managed without first resolving who controls the productive assets.
• Musk’s hypothetical abundance applies to the transition period rather than merely to a distant post-scarcity endpoint.

Social Function

Primary classification: transition management and ideological anesthetic, with a substantial partial-truth component.

The article performs useful diagnostic work by naming ownership, bargaining power, tax revenue and the wage-consumption link. But its framing converts a power struggle into a menu of reasonable options. That reassures business, government and workers simultaneously: businesses are told they may choose inclusion, workers are told skills may preserve their place, and policymakers are told redistribution can be added later.

Its deepest ideological service is to preserve the assumption that the existing economic order remains the default destination. The article does not ask what happens when labor is no longer needed as the mass distribution mechanism. It asks how to keep money flowing to people, which is a narrower consumption problem. Transfers can preserve purchasing power. They cannot restore productive participation or make the majority necessary to capital.

The Verdict

This is a competent inventory of postponements, not a solution to the discontinuity. It recognizes the corpse—the wage-to-consumption circuit—but keeps proposing new ways to dress it for public circulation.

Michigan’s manufacturing capacity may produce valuable transition niches: robotics maintenance, energy systems, logistics, infrastructure and control of bottlenecks. Those are survivable positions, not proof that mass employment survives. The decisive question is ownership and control of AI capital. Without that, Michigan can manufacture the machinery of its own labor obsolescence while calling the production boom prosperity.

The article is therefore partially truthful but structurally evasive: AI may determine how much wealth exists, yet competitive ownership determines who receives it—and once labor loses necessity, workers have no automatic claim on the output they no longer control.