Here’s the AI debate we keep getting sold:
Camp 1: AI is going to destroy humanity.
Camp 2: AI is going to create abundance, eliminate boring work, and free us all.
I think both sides are skipping the most important question.
Who gets the upside?
Because AI becoming incredibly capable does not automatically mean your life gets better.
Imagine AI makes your company 30% more productive.
Great.
What happens next?
Maybe you work four days a week.
Maybe your salary goes up.
Maybe products get cheaper.
Or maybe the company fires 20% of the workforce, raises everyone else’s targets by 30%, and shareholders keep the gains.
Same technology.
Very different future.
That’s why I think asking whether someone is “pro-AI” or “anti-AI” is almost useless.
A better question is:
Under what terms is AI entering your life?
Take two examples.
You use ChatGPT to prepare for a doctor’s appointment.
You chose the tool.
It makes you smarter.
You can ignore it whenever you want.
That feels like freedom.
Now imagine your health insurer replaces its claims department with an AI system.
It rejects your claim.
Nobody can explain why.
There is no human to appeal to.
Also AI.
But now the machine isn’t increasing your choices.
It is increasing somebody else’s ability to make decisions about you.
That distinction matters.
A lot.
The same thing is coming to the workplace.
Most knowledge workers will probably love having AI remove pointless admin.
Nobody dreams about spending Thursday afternoon updating Salesforce.
But imagine the AI removes 40% of the work.
Who captures that 40%?
The employee?
The customer?
The company?
The owners of the AI infrastructure?
That is where economics enters the conversation.
And eventually, politics.
Because work gives people more than income.
It gives them leverage.
If a company desperately needs 10,000 engineers, those engineers have bargaining power.
If AI means the company needs 2,000 engineers instead, something else has changed too:
the scarcity of human labour.
And scarcity is power.
This creates a strange possibility.
We could become materially richer while individual workers become economically weaker.
More abundance.
Less bargaining power.
Those two things can exist at the same time.
This is also why I’m skeptical whenever someone says:
“AI will free humanity from work.”
Maybe.
But there is a missing sentence.
AI can reduce the amount of human labour required to produce something.
That is a technical claim.
Whether the person whose labour is no longer required becomes freer is a completely different question.
If you own the robots, freedom from work sounds fantastic.
If the robots replace your income, the experience might feel slightly different.
The technology does not answer that question.
Ownership does.
Competition does.
Institutions do.
Policy does.
And bargaining power does.
This doesn’t mean AI doomers are automatically right either.
Automation does not mathematically equal permanent mass unemployment.
Cheaper goods can create new demand.
Entire industries can appear.
Human roles can shift.
We’ve seen this pattern before.
The problem is that both camps jump from:
“AI can do this task”
to:
“Therefore society will look like this.”
That leap is where ideology sneaks in.
The honest answer is that capability tells us what becomes possible.
Power determines what gets built.
So when someone tells you AI is going to create abundance, ask:
Who owns the machines?
When someone says AI will make us all more productive, ask:
Who receives the productivity gain?
When a company says AI improves efficiency, ask:
Efficiency for whom?
And when someone promises AI will give humans more freedom, ask the most important question:
Will ordinary people have more ability to say no?
No to an employer.
No to a platform.
No to an algorithmic decision.
No to a provider that changes the rules after everyone becomes dependent on it.
Because freedom is not just having cheap products and powerful software.
Freedom is having options.