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A World Without Workers
As opposition to AI data centers grows, the tech elite’s pursuit of a world without workers threatens to hollow out the economy, erode worker power, and fuel a growing revolt against corporate control over our lives and futures.
The rapid rise of anti-data center sentiment has stunned both the tech and political establishments, catching them off-guard and reaching such a fever pitch that numerous mainstream media outlets are now speculating the backlash against these behemoth projects could swing the midterm elections. Candidates on both sides are rushing to distance themselves from the increasingly toxic term, but being against data centers, and specifically the giant hyperscale AI buildouts, doesn’t necessarily equate to being against the AI they’re being built to support. The physical imprint of AI is hyperscale data centers, built to house the compute necessary for people to generate AI photos and videos, and for Google and Meta and Elon Musk to embed AI tools everywhere they can, whether we want them or not. But while 75% of Americans don’t want a data center built near them, just 39% think AI does more harm than good according to a 2026 Gallup poll. More than half think AI does roughly equal amounts of good and harm.
The disconnect is fascinating. And we could trace it to all sorts of places. The clearest thing is that data centers are immediately disruptive when they’re built in communities. They consume valuable land, they drive up electricity costs, they consume large amounts of water, and tech companies are intent on steamrolling local democracy in order to ram these projects through. Data centers and the gas turbines they increasingly use to get around the electric grid are noisy, polluting, and sometimes unpermitted and illegal. None of this is reflected in how most people interact with AI. The two primary uses of AI that people seem to encounter most on a daily basis are silly images they see online and a chatbot that answers questions and helps them out with annoying work or school stuff, or random innocuous questions. The gap and distinction here is clear.
At the same time, millions of people who might just experience AI as a silly or helpful tool are increasingly aware that tech companies are aiming to replace their jobs with AI. Right now only about a quarter of Americans say they trust businesses “a lot” or even “some” to handle AI responsibly — in other words, even if they don’t have the same vitriol for the new tech that they have for data centers they still don’t trust Big Tech to implement it. And they shouldn’t. The business case for AI, the case that justifies spending over $1 trillion building out AI infrastructure this year alone according to Goldman Sachs, is that it can replace the biggest cost at your company: workers. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios in 2025 that artificial intelligence could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and push the national unemployment rate to 10% to 20% within one to five years. Often these statements are framed as a “warning,” but they should also be understood as a CEO making a bold claim about the power of his product.
He’s not talking to us, of course. Amodei isn’t pitching the 99.9% about a technology powerful enough to replace our jobs. He’s talking to other CEOs, investors, the ruling class. He’s talking to a group of people who have everything they could ever want or need in life, and still want more. Specifically, this class of people have always been obsessed with limiting worker pay and power. Since the advent of capitalism, and even more so since the advent of the variety of shareholder capitalism that demands short-term profits and short-term bumps in stock prices, the instant boost that corporate bottom lines can get from eliminating batches of workers has caused the ruling class to salivate. And right now we’re seeing the full, foolish extension of that logic.
Amodei isn’t alone. At a 2019 New York Times event, Sam Altman said that AI will likely take over most jobs done by humans This isn’t what’s happening, yet, and some AI “leaders” like Altman are starting to change their tune amidst backlash and the reality that their tech isn’t keeping up with the endless promises they’ve made. But the premise, and the desire, remain. So far this year there have already been over 175,000 layoffs across the tech industry. The bosses are mostly thanking AI for replacing jobs and supplementing the work that the remaining workers are able to do — so whether or not AI is living up to the overhyped promises of the guys whose jobs is largely to hype it up, bosses are still pursuing their vision of eliminating as much of the labor force as possible.
The short-term thinking of Wall Street and corporate America has infected the minds of the ruling class. They appear unable to, or uninterested in doing, coherent long-term thinking. They’re making record profits as we speak and appear unaware that their model of endless extraction is totally incompatible with any sort of long-term functional economy. The rich fantasize about replacing us with robots, but don’t pause to consider that their wealth is built on the back of laborers and consumers, and if laborers can no longer consume their economy will collapse.
I don’t know if it will happen all at once, and some bosses are certainly realizing that AI can’t replace workers as they hoped it could. Some companies are hiring back workers they had attempted to replace with AI. At the same time, Jeff Bezos and others are trying to replace manufacturing workers — an industry already wracked by automation — with AI. Bezos has been raising $100 billion to put toward this effort. The goal of replacing labor, typically the most expensive element of a business, in the pursuit of endless profit will certainly continue. And as people lose jobs and the economy gets weaker, mountains of debt will pile, more people will resort to “buy now, pay later” schemes, and gig work will proliferate. Capitalism’s ability to string us along and perpetuate itself shouldn’t be underestimated. But, at the same time, the ruling class is actively hollowing out the biggest economy the world has ever seen and turning it into a house of cards.
This isn’t new. The manufacturing base of the U.S. economy has been actively hollowed out for decades. Financialization, service work, and consumption have replaced making things, and a working class living paycheck to paycheck has largely replaced the middle class. The ruling class wants servants, not workers, and too many of us have fallen into their trap as we’ve been convinced to identify as consumers rather than laborers. We blinked and now we can have any shitty product we want shipped to our front door, but we don’t have pensions or union protections or home ownership. Decades of neoliberalism and a culture of consumerism eroded what little worker power Americans had, and now the ruling class doesn’t even pretend to care about our needs, our jobs, or our opinions.
The ruling class wants a world without workers. And for those they can’t replace with algorithm-controlled robots, capitalists would love to see us replaced with subservient workers, ones they can order around with Uber, DoorDash, or whatever app they use at the Amazon warehouse. As Pope Leo has recently written, we must “safeguard the human person in the time of AI.” That means protecting that which makes us human, our art and our cognition and our imagination, but we will have no ability to protect that if our worker power and the collective power of the working class is fully stripped away from us. Relegation to algorithmically controlled isolated workers, accountable to an app with little to no ability to have solidarity with one another weakens all of us, in addition to being soul-crushing in and of itself. The ruling class wants to see no slack in the economy, they want maximal profit extraction in every sector. And that type of economy leaves us scrambling, leaves us with no time for leisure and no time for organizing — the Musk-Bezos dream.
The ruling class wants a world without workers, and certainly without worker power. They’re getting closer to this vision every day, with the help of their fascist-oligarch regime. As they draw closer and we grow more desperate, we see instances of people lashing out, instances of desperation, and a still nascent political movement starting to push back on a national scale. Millions of people are gaining class consciousness and are beginning to put that consciousness into action. Millions of people are viscerally feeling the dehumanization that the ruling class is deliberately imposing upon us, and instead of simply submitting we’re seeing the beginnings of a revolt. Data centers, flock cameras, electoral politics and more — we’re seeing people start to catch fire. We’re seeing people say enough is enough, we insist on having a say in our future, we insist on having some power over our own lives, we insist on a future that is human and humane, not just for a select few, but for all of us.