With mass automation looming, is a resistance movement coalescing?

Can a ragtag team of AI dissidents outplay the powerful, deep-pocketed tech bros?

Ronnie Chatterji, OpenAI’s first chief economist, said while there were jobs that could be pushed aside by artificial intelligence, the nature of new technology was the creation of even more jobs… “I’m not saying that there will be no impact on the job market, but saying productivity will increase and there will be completely new jobs in different sectors created.”
Shane Wright, SMH, 1/6/25

I do have a well-founded mistrust of the altruism of powerful groups in society, who throughout history preferred to concentrate wealth and power for their benefit, rather than distributing it for the common good. The values of a society don’t only show in the events that take place, but in imagining the events that are plausible—that’s the point of art—and today, a slow-motion and comfortable genocide of the working class as a possibility isn’t that far-fetched.
Ramiro Blanco, Writer by Technicality, 30/6/25

“You may have half the index virtually collapse by 50, 60 or 70 per cent in share price in the next five to 10 years because businesses are so disrupted… AI is going to be hugely disruptive… There will be people who are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and within five to 10 years, maybe 50 to 70 per cent of those jobs just will not exist anymore,” Mr Douglass warned.

“What happens then to demand for goods and services? We used to own LVMH. If you go five to 10 years out and you start mass losses over a five to 10 year frame, when 20, 30 or 40 per cent of the professional workforce around the world don’t have jobs, who’s going to be spending $6,000 on a handbag? As you accelerate this over time, businesses you think are wonderful today, you start saying to yourself, ‘what happens if the customers don’t have the money?’”

“Some of the large tech executives are out there publicly saying, ‘oh, well jobs are always to be found’. But that’s not what they’re saying privately. In private they’re saying, ‘these jobs are gone forever’,” [my emphasis] Mr Douglass said.
Cliona O’Dowd, The Australian, 30/6/25

Australia stands at another inflection point. This time, the disruptor is artificial intelligence. And its pace and reach will likely surpass that of globalisation. Where globalisation hollowed out blue-collar manufacturing jobs, AI is set to reshape white-collar professions. Legal services, media, finance, education, marketing, customer service, and even software engineering are vulnerable to significant disruption. These roles form the backbone of Australia’s knowledge economy, the very foundation of the post-industrial future we embraced as the factories shut down… Economically, we may see a downward shift in wages and a surge in professional displacement. Politically, the consequences could be just as disruptive. The disillusionment we saw after globalisation, fuelled by rising inequality and a sense of betrayal, could return in new and more volatile forms.
Kos Samaras, AFR, 30/6/25

Microsoft is laying off just under 4% of its global workforce in the tech giant’s second wave of cuts this year… Microsoft slashed over 6,000 roles in May and another 300 in June.
Capital Brief, 2/7/25

Few Australians, let alone non-Australians, will recognise the name Hamish Douglass. Think of him as an Antipodean Ray Dalio. (He cofounded Magellan Financial Group, which had over A$100 billion under management at its peak.)

You’d imagine someone with Douglass’s credentials confirming what many of us suspect – that the Chatterjis of the world are talking out of their arse in the hopes of diverting attention from an already beginning-to-unfold labour market apocalypse, which will inevitably lead to a whole-of-economy meltdown – would generate more of a media storm.

But I guess the attention-grabbing predictions about AI are coming so thick and fast these days that people are starting to zone out. Plus, Douglass’s thunder was stolen by the Ross Douthat – Peter Thiel NYT podcast, during which Thiel lamented AI not being nearly disruptive enough. He warned that, after decades of relative technological and (for the little people) economic stagnation, Western democracies are teetering. "If we don't find a way back to the future, I do think that society — I don't know. It unravels, it doesn't work,” Thiel sighed.

What is to be done?
Let’s set aside whether profound technological disruption is ultimately a good or bad thing. What happens if jobs – specifically prestigious and well-paid Professional Managerial Class jobs – start evaporating rapidly? (Let’s assume that, contrary to the Open AI bigwig’s soothing reassurances, the disappearing jobs aren’t replaced by even more prestigious and well-paid ones.)

Capital will be, shall we say, philosophical about spiralling unemployment rates.

Democratically elected politicians will be less sanguine. But if half a century of neoliberalism has demonstrated anything, it’s that Anglosphere politicians – both of the centre-left and centre-right variety – will reliably prioritise donor-class interests over the voters’.*

At this point in articles about mass automation, it’s convention to point out that the union movement might have one final grand battle left in it. Colour me unconvinced. I’m old enough to remember the pre-globalisation, pre-neoliberal 1970s, back when Organised Labour had some real clout. Of course, unions are still in a position to exert influence in a handful of industries. However, such industries are now the exception rather than the rule, especially in the private sector.

So, with Capital all for mass automation, the political class torn between the wishes of voters and donors, and the union movement a shadow of its former self, are we all doomed?

Well, probably, but let’s examine the nascent Resistance anyway. (No, not that Resistance.)

The conscientious objectors
The general public is aware of the AI threat in large part because the Oskar Schindlers of Silicon Valley have alerted them to it. The list of those who’ve walked away from lucrative, high-status roles and attempted to warn the general public about what’s coming now includes Mo Gadwat, Timnit Gebru, Tristan Harris, Geoffrey ‘Godfather of AI’ Hinton and Meredith Whittaker. (And those are just the Google alums.)

Prominent tech industry heavy hitters, businesspeople, public intellectuals and populist politicians – such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Replit CEO Amjad Masad and Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, as well as the likes of Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang – have also been vigorously ringing the alarm bell.

PMCers can choose to remain in denial about the likelihood of their jobs being automated away. But they can’t say they weren’t warned if they find themselves being escorted out of the office by a security guard clutching their belongings in a cardboard box in the eminently foreseeable future.

AI 2027
I thought mass automation would be a frogs-boiling-slowly scenario. But a couple of emails I’ve received in recent days have provided cause for optimism.

I hadn’t thought much about AI 2027 since they made a splash a while back with a report predicting Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) could arrive as early as 2027. (If you’re rolling your eyes at this juncture, please be aware that erstwhile OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo founded AI 2027 and has attracted the support of other respected figures, such as Scott ‘Astral Codex Ten’ Alexander.)

Anyhoo, it seems the AI 2027 crew haven’t been idle since their spectacular debut. In his latest Substack missive, crew member Eli Lifland casually observes, “Society isn’t acting with anywhere near the appropriate urgency. We may only have 2 years left before humanity’s fate is sealed!” before outlining what he’d like to see happen.

(“As companies automate AI R&D, governments are on high alert and take action… Companies publish detailed safety cases justifying why their AIs won’t cause catastrophic harm… The US and China coordinate to reduce competitive pressures, ensuring models aren’t developed without strong safety cases.”)

Even better, there’s advice about what those in different industries can do to prevent Skynet from achieving self-awareness. If you’re an early-career journalist, dear reader, you may wish to apply for a Tarbell Fellowship. Lifland encourages those who aren’t “working full-time on AI safety” to spread the word among friends and family, post on social media, and donate to various AI safety causes.

Mutual aid
As previously noted, with the scythe hovering an increasing number of tech industry employees are joining unions. I wish them and the unions they’ve joined well, but I’m not sure how effective an anti-mass automation strategy that will be. What are all those recently signed-up union members going to do exactly – threaten to withdraw their labour?

But at least one anti-mass-automation mutual aid group has now been formed. I’ll let Brian Merchant, of Blood in the Machine, tell the story from here:

I’ve heard dozens of harrowing, dark, and absurd stories from engineers, product managers, marketers, coders, and beyond, each of whom have seen their livelihoods transformed, degraded, or replaced outright by AI.

One person who wrote in with an account was Kim Crawley. Crawley is a cybersecurity expert, author and college instructor who’s been hit hard by generative AI… She and some peers were starting a project to do something about it. They were organizing a mutual aid group called Stop Gen AI…

“I approached a bunch of unions and guilds,” Crawley says. “They didn't seem to be doing much to counter the Gen AI menace. That's when I realized I had to take matters into my own hands and not wait for someone else to take the initiative… Starting the group had greatly improved by mental health. Because we're doing something. We're not just watching Gen AI make all of us poor and destroy the planet.”

Which way will the PMC jump?
If I didn’t know better, I’d think The Free Press’s River Page was generating his think pieces by getting ChatGPT to remix old Precariat Musings posts. In a recent effort concerning the youthful Muslim socialist on track to be New York’s next mayor, Page tied the once-unthinkable (primary) election result back to an increasingly agitated and skint PMC.

Page noted the PMC defected from its New Deal-era alliance with the working class and threw its lot in with the plutocrats circa 1980. He also observed, as I frequently have, that neoliberalism was, until recently, kind to both the plutocrats and the PMC. Especially the upper echelons of the PMC.

As I’m wont to, Page even liberally quotes the OG, Barbara Ehrenreich.

I was among the young professional managerial class. When you hear about the laptop class—the people with AirPods, college degrees, and “good” jobs that require them to have three roommates in their thirties—this is them. They’re the most privileged class of workers ever produced by capitalism, and they want to end it…

When the economic crisis of the ’70s hit, it was the insecurity of their class position that sealed the deal. “They retreated into their careers and private lives, secure in the belief that the ‘have-nots’ were not worth helping anyway,” Ehrenreich writes…

The worldly and secular professionals spent the next several decades focusing almost solely on social issues, turning the Democratic Party, from Bill Clinton forward, into a socially progressive party that embraced the so-called “neoliberal” consensus on economic issues… The transition from a manufacturing economy to a service-based one might have killed blue-collar factory jobs, but it created professional managerial class careers in finance, education, and tech, among other fields.

Only now, white-collar workers – abruptly, inexplicably, unjustly, intolerably – find themselves in much the same position their blue-collar counterparts have been in for several decades. After automating away much physical labour, Capital is now getting started on the more expensive cognitive variety.

Even those lucky enough to get the elite jobs still find themselves in a precarious position. If the Great Recession, Covid-19, and the specter of an artificial intelligence-assisted “white collar bloodbath” has taught the professional class anything, it is that their credentials cannot save them. This insecurity, compounded by the outrageous cost of living in many large cities, has pushed the PMC’s anxieties to the breaking point. Add that to the triumph of identity politics in professional class institutions like universities, corporate C-suites, non-governmental organizations, and media—itself a byproduct of inter-elite competition as many have observed—and what you have is the modern left. Therefore, it shouldn’t be any surprise that Mamdani-esque socialism is sprouting up in the places where the PMC is at its most precarious.

Page concludes his article by noting, “The PMC has a different mantra, one that will lead them to whatever political movement their insecurities drive them to, and it’s this: I will not accept a life I do not deserve.”

The PMC’s inextinguishable sense of entitlement just might end up saving all of humanity! As a rather more prominent Substacker likes to say, know hope.

*About a decade ago, a couple of professors – from Princeton, no less – found: Economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence… When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose.