AI and the Free Market

From a July 2, 2025 an article from the Wall Street Journal, entitled, “CEOs Start Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud: AI Will Wipe Out Jobs”: 

“Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.,” Chief Executive Jim Farley said in an interview last week with author Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “AI will leave a lot of white-collar people behind.”

“Leaving people behind” is an interesting euphemism. If millions of people lose their jobs, then it is not just as if a bus left without them, and now the poor suckers have to wait 10 minutes for the next bus. In a capitalist country with a tattered safety net, people without jobs will struggle to find shelter and food, let alone medical care.

Of course, we might hope an unregulated free market will take care of any temporary unemployment caused by AI. After all, we have survived previous developments in automation. In 1800, over 30% of the workforce was in agriculture whereas today that figure is less than 2%; this does not mean that 28% of the workforce suddenly became unemployed. Other jobs arose, jobs that people in 1800 would have scarcely been able to imagine.  

We can hope that something similar will happen with this new technology: “don’t worry about the jobs AI wipes out; new types of jobs will come along.” But that seems naïvely optimistic. The computer and AI revolution is happening much more quickly than did the agricultural revolution. It took decades of a steady decline in agricultural employment to get to where we are today, whereas the CEOs seem to be talking about AI wiping out huge numbers of jobs over just the next few years. What huge influx of new sorts of jobs will take place in such a short period of time? (You might think that we will need more computer people—programmers and the like. But, in an ironic twist, coding jobs are among the most vulnerable—many coders can be replaced by AI.)

So what are we to do if the CEOs are right and AI creates massive unemployment?

The unfettered market solution would be simply to allow it to happen: the owners of the AI and the owners of the businesses that use the AI will profit greatly and become even richer, while the millions who are unemployed (those who are “left behind”) will attempt to subsist on whatever scraps they can get from private charity.  Is that what we really want?