Regulate the bot: Diokno, lawmakers push for 'National AI Governance Act' to save jobs

TEXT START: To cushion the blow of modern technology on the labor force, the Akbayan reform bloc has filed a measure seeking to regulate the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and protect workers from potential job displacement.

THE DISSECTION

This is a transition-management document disguised as a job-preservation strategy. Its proposed tools—reskilling, redeployment, labor-market support, social protection, transparency, and worker participation—can administer displacement, slow its political impact, and distribute its costs. They do not restore the economic necessity of human labor.

The headline promises to “save jobs.” The body quietly describes cushioning the blow after displacement occurs. That contradiction is the entire document: political language sells preservation while policy language prepares for managed loss. The 92-percent adoption figure makes the timing worse. The state is not confronting a distant possibility; it is trying to regulate a diffusion already underway.

THE CORE FALLACY

The bill treats AI displacement as a governance defect rather than a structural consequence of competitive substitution. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, once AI achieves durable cost and performance superiority across cognitive work, firms are pressured to replace labor regardless of whether lawmakers have produced a unified framework.

Regulation can slow deployment, impose liability, improve transparency, or redistribute some gains. It cannot make a human worker economically necessary when an automated system performs the task more cheaply, continuously, and at scale. Reskilling does not solve this if the destination jobs are also exposed to automation. It merely moves workers from one shrinking queue to another.

The bill therefore addresses the symptoms—unfairness, opacity, abrupt termination, inadequate support—while leaving the kill mechanism intact: the severing of the mass employment-to-wage-to-consumption circuit. Social protection may preserve consumption. It does not preserve productive participation.

HIDDEN ASSUMPTIONS

• That “affected” jobs in the IMF projection are jobs that can be saved, rather than jobs whose tasks become economically substitutable.
• That reskilling creates new demand for human labor instead of preparing workers for the next round of automation.
• That redeployment can absorb displaced workers at mass scale while AI continues lowering the labor requirement of other sectors.
• That worker participation can materially override firms’ competitive incentives.
• That a national framework can contain substitution pressures when AI systems, services, and competition are not confined to Philippine borders.
• That slowing adoption changes the destination rather than merely extending the lag before arrival.
• That preserving consumption through transfers or social protection is equivalent to preserving economic inclusion.
• That “responsible utilization” can reconcile mass labor substitution with the existing employment-centered social order.

SOCIAL FUNCTION

Primary classification: transition management, reinforced by ideological anesthetic and partial truth.

The partial truth is that governance can reduce arbitrary harm, expose automated decisions, establish accountability, and buy institutional time. The anesthetic is the suggestion that better rules can preserve the old labor bargain. The bill converts systemic obsolescence into an administrative problem, allowing institutions to appear responsive while the underlying production logic continues moving against mass employment.

THE VERDICT

HB No. 10362 is a speed governor and casualty-allocation instrument, not a job-saving architecture. It may extend the social and legal lag, make displacement more transparent, and manage the distribution of losses. It does not defeat cognitive automation, coordination pressure, or the collapse of productive participation. The headline sells salvation; the substance prepares the paperwork for obsolescence.