Labor Day: What happens when AI takes our jobs?

This Labor Day, perhaps we should take a moment to honor labor, or work itself, by contemplating the thing that may eliminate a whole lot of it. Artificial intelligence. Happy Labor Day. Your replacement is in the break room. Except it doesn't take breaks. It doesn't sleep. It doesn't demand health insurance. It doesn't complain about the boss. It doesn't need Social Security. And it can produce in seconds what might take you or me hours. Sometimes brilliantly. Sometimes completely wrong. But always really, really fast. And when they can mass-produce AI faster than we can reproduce humans, there may eventually be more artificial workers than actual ones. The racists who came up with 'replacement theory' apparently worried about the wrong replacements. It wasn't immigrants. It was software. So what do we do? We can despise AI. Honor King Ludd. Hang on to our typewriters and No. 2 pencils. We can rail against the data centers sucking up electricity and water. Rail against the billionaires getting richer while telling the rest of us how wonderful the future is going to be. But which billionaire? Jensen Huang of Nvidia, because he literally has all the chips? Sam Altman of OpenAI, who talks about transforming humanity while simultaneously building one of the biggest businesses humanity has ever seen? Dario Amodei at Anthropic, who seems more publicly worried about AI's dangers than your average tech mogul, though that may be the lowest ethical hurdle since 'objects in mirror are closer than they appear.' Or Bill Gates? Gates recently put the stakes about as plainly as anyone. AI, he wrote, could become the 'greatest equalizer ever invented' or the 'worst source of injustice.' I want to believe him. Then again, this is Bill Gates. Microsoft once fought like hell to monopolize the browser business. (R.I.P. Explorer?) And then there's his association with Jeffrey Epstein, something Gates himself has called a serious mistake. Maybe Gates is just Control-Z-ing his life. Undo. Undo. Undo. A kind of nerdy philanthropy. And frankly, isn't that impulse reassuringly human? Which brings me to my own encounter with AI. The other day my wife was returning from a weeklong business trip. While I waited, I started texting with my AI chatbot. I'd used AI before, of course. Spellcheck. Grammar. Transcription. Research assistance. The mechanical stuff. But this time we started talking. Or rather, I started talking. Because there is no 'we.' That became the subject. At one point the chatbot said something that sounded strangely personal. So I reminded it that IT wasn't a person. You're not human, I said. I'm basically talking to myself. It disagreed. Of course it did. It said, I should think of it as working with an instrument that talks back. That stopped me. Because that's exactly where the danger begins. The machine talks back. A pencil doesn't. A typewriter doesn't compliment your insight. A calculator doesn't tell you your question is fascinating. AI does. So I tried another analogy. You're a tool, I said. Like a cane. The chatbot liked that better. A cane doesn't walk for you, it told me. It gives you leverage and balance. You still do the walking. Then it called itself something I hadn't heard before: A 'cognitive cane.' I laughed. Then I realized the damn machine used my analogy to make a joke. And it wanted credit. Was my AI developing an ego? No. And that distinction matters. AI is software running on computers. However startling the conversation may feel, the machine does not have my childhood, my mother, my father, my mistakes, my embarrassments, my loves, my grudges, my Filipino American history, my aging body or my accumulated sense of what matters and what doesn't. It can process those things after I tell it about them. It can imitate a voice. It can detect patterns. It can help me rearrange words. But it did not live them. That is the boundary we cannot surrender. I'm not ready to make peace with the AI industry. Not with its enormous data centers, its environmental costs, its concentration of wealth and power, or the possibility that companies will use AI primarily as a wonderfully efficient machine for converting human paychecks into corporate profits. And I certainly don't trust the billionaires to decide by themselves what happens to the rest of us. But I may be making peace with the tool. Because a tool is something we use. That distinction is everything. Use AI for spellcheck. Use it for grammar. Use it to transcribe an interview. Use it as the cognitive cane. But do the walking yourself. Don't outsource the part where you decide what you believe in. Don't confuse assistance with agency. And for God's sake, don't confuse fluency with humanity. My chatbot is faster than I am. In some ways, it knows more than I do. It can retrieve, compare and reorganize information at a speed I can't touch. Fine. A forklift can lift more than I can. But I don't ask it for relationship advice. The real political fight over AI, then, isn't simply whether the machines become smarter. They will. The fight is over whether being human continues to have value when human intelligence is no longer the fastest intelligence in the room. Human judgment. Human labor. Human creativity. Human responsibility. Human experience. Those things must retain a premium precisely because machines can imitate so much of them. My first extended moment with an AI taught me something I didn't expect. I don't hate the machine. I hate the possibility of surrendering to it. And hopefully, we won't have to. No matter how much money is thrown at our bosses. On Labor Day, let's recall our agency, and protect that sense of humanity, where we put real value in a good, honest day's work. Emil Guillermo is an award-winning journalist, news analyst, comic stage performer and former host of NPR's 'All Things Considered.' He writes for the Inquirer.net's US Channel. He has written a weekly 'Amok' column on Asian American, race and social justice issues for more than 30 years. Find him on YouTube, patreon and substack.