AI did not take your job

“AI will take your job.”

There is something interesting about the grammar of that sentence. AI takes your job. Prices rise. Markets demand. The economy requires. Jobs disappear. Apparently, capitalism is full of things that just happen by themselves.

Prices do not usually “rise” like the tide. Someone decides to charge more. Jobs do not simply “disappear”. Someone decides that the work should no longer be paid for, should be distributed among fewer people, outsourced, automated, or eliminated entirely.

And AI does not walk into an office, look around, select an employee and fire them. Someone decides to replace that employee. This becomes even more obvious in the equally popular sentence: “You won’t be replaced by AI. You’ll be replaced by someone using AI.”

It sounds like career advice, but it performs the same trick while adding a particularly nasty twist. Now there is a second worker we can blame. So you had better learn faster than them. Become more productive than them. Adapt before them. Make sure you are the person using AI rather than the person replaced by the person using AI. You do not have to outrun the zombies. You just have to outrun your colleague. It directs our attention sideways and downward while making the decision from above almost invisible.

The older colleague becomes the problem. The person with disabilities becomes insufficiently adaptable. The parent with care responsibilities cannot keep up. The exhausted worker who does not have another ten hours a week to “future-proof” themselves has failed to remain relevant.

Someone has to lose. Your task is simply to make sure it is not you. AI did not invent this logic. Capitalism has always been remarkably good at turning structural conflicts into competitions between individuals. If workers can be convinced that the threat is the worker next to them, there is considerably less reason to ask who designed the race, who changes its rules, and who collects the winnings.

Of course people should learn how to use new tools. Adaptation can be entirely rational when your livelihood depends on it. But individual adaptation and collective power answer completely different questions. Learning AI might help determine whether you survive the next restructuring. It does not determine why somebody has to be sacrificed in the first place. So perhaps we should become a little more careful with our grammar. AI does not take jobs. People with power over other people’s employment make decisions about what to do with AI. And unlike “AI”, those people can be held accountable.