Politics

To stop this race to the bottom, economists, policymakers, and labor advocates agree that we cannot rely on the goodwill of tech CEOs. Instead, society must build hard legal, financial, and structural guardrails to force AI wealth back into the hands of the public.Because the corporate system will not self-correct, fixing this requires a multi-pronged approach across law, labor, and technology.

1. Shift the Tax Burden from Humans to Robots.

Right now, the tax system incentivizes companies to fire humans and hire AI [ finance ].The Problem: When a company employs a human, they pay payroll taxes, healthcare, and benefits. When they switch to an AI, they just pay a tax-deductible software subscription.The Fix: Implement an "AI/Robot Tax." If a company automates away 5,000 jobs, they should pay an automation tax equivalent to the payroll taxes those workers used to generate. This eliminates the financial incentive to automate purely for cheap labor and creates a fund to retrain workers.

2. Legalize "Data Dividends" (Pay Humans for Training Data)

AI models cannot function without human creativity, writing, and data. Tech companies essentially strip-mined the internet to build their wealth for free.The Fix: Pass federal Data Dignity laws. If an AI company uses your legal briefs, medical notes, customer service logs, or artwork to train a model that will eventually automate your job, they must legally pay you ongoing royalties. Turning human data into a private, monetized asset gives workers permanent leverage over AI corporations.

3. Collective Bargaining and "Anti-AI" Union Contracts

Labor unions are currently the most effective defense against aggressive corporate automation.The Blueprint: Major labor battles—like the Hollywood writers' and actors' strikes, and recent dockworker and culinary union strikes—have successfully written ironclad rules into their contracts.The Rules: These contracts stipulate that AI can only be used as a tool to assist human workers, never to replace them, and that AI-generated material cannot be used to cut human wages. Expanding union protections to white-collar tech, finance, and administrative workers is vital.

4. Mandate "Human-in-the-Loop" Regulations

Governments must pass laws making it illegal for AI to make final decisions in high-stakes industries, ensuring humans remain essential to the workforce.The Law: In sectors like healthcare, banking, law, and aviation, it should be legally required that a licensed human professional review, edit, and sign off on every single AI output. This prevents companies from firing entire departments and ensures that human judgment and legal accountability cannot be automated away.

5. Build Open-Source, Public AI Infrastructure

Right now, a handful of trillion-dollar tech companies (Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta) control the infrastructure of the future.The Fix: Governments must fund and build National Public AI Utilities. Just like public roads, libraries, and water systems, a baseline of advanced AI computing power should be open-source and free for small businesses, universities, and citizens. This prevents a tiny group of monopolies from controlling all economic leverage and dictating global prices.

Ultimately, the goal is not to ban AI—which is likely impossible—but to decouple survival from traditional 40-hour-a-week execution labor. If AI creates trillions of dollars in new wealth, that wealth must be distributed via public infrastructure, shorter workweeks, and stronger social safety nets, rather than pooling entirely in Silicon Valley bank accounts.If you want to see how these fights are playing out right now, let me know if you'd like to look at current pieces of legislation being debated in Congress or how specific industries are successfully fighting back against automation.