They Are Setting Our Expectations

What if AI is not an existential risk — but an existential reward?

They are telling us AI will destroy humanity.

Elon Musk calls it “the greatest threat to the continued existence” of our species. Sam Altman warns of “civilizational destruction.” Geoffrey Hinton — one of the people who built the thing — says it poses an existential risk. And maybe it does.

But listen to who is saying it. The people warning us are the same people building it. And it is supposed to make them very, very rich.

In 2025, companies admitted to nearly 55,000 layoffs to AI. In the first three months of 2026 alone, they admitted almost 28,000 more — with March the first month on record where AI was the leading reason for job cuts in this country. The fear is not hypothetical. It is already arriving in email form.

They are not helping us. They are setting our expectations.

If you are bracing for the end of the world, you are not asking what you want the world to look like. A world where AI takes your job and hands you a retraining voucher feels like mercy — if you were promised annihilation. A world where the same people who built the machines keep all the gains feels like the natural order — if the alternative was extinction.

Low expectations are not a warning. They are a floor. And the people setting the floor are the people who benefit from wherever we land. The productivity flows up. The losses flow down. The gap is the business model.

So let’s ask the question they are counting on us not to ask.

What if AI is not an existential risk but an existential reward?

This is not only about AI. The move is older than that. What they don’t want us to do — ever, on anything — is imagine a world better than the one we are in now. Narrow what we are allowed to imagine, and the future belongs to the people who already have power. It works on AI. It works on wages. It works on what this country is for.

So imagine anyway. That is where it starts.

Fear of automation, at its root, is that we cannot imagine valuing people outside of their labor. We have spent a hundred years telling each other that your worth is what you produce. Now a machine produces it faster, and we panic. Not because the machine is evil. Because we built a world where a person without a job is a person without a place.

That is not a fact about technology. That is a failure of our imagination.

So imagine it: Machines doing the work they can do. Us doing the work only we can do. Caring for our parents as they age. Raising our kids. Teaching. Building something with our hands. Cooking for the people we love. Sitting with a neighbor.

Beautiful work. Work that has always been the most important work there is. Work we have never paid for because we decided, a hundred years ago, that only the work a machine could measure counted.

A machine can measure almost anything now. The hours are ours to take back.

The rules of American work are a hundred years old. The minimum wage. The 40-hour week. The weekend. Someone decided those were the rules. Someone can decide new ones. A shorter work week. A living wage for the work a human has to do. Time to rest. Time to live. Time to be a parent, a neighbor, a friend — not because you squeezed it into a Sunday, but because the economy finally admitted that is what you are here for.

My mother has spent her whole life waiting for a Sunday afternoon that didn’t end. A few hours in a classroom helping kids learn to read. A walk. A dinner with the people she loves. She has done every one of those things. She has just never been allowed to do them on a Tuesday.

The only thing between us and that world is a story that says we do not deserve it.

If AI takes your job, what would you want to do instead?

For me, I would run a food truck. Or coach high school football. Or dedicate my life to studying plants and fungi.

Your answer is not a fantasy. It is a demand. And you are not the first to make it. Rideshare drivers are already organizing against the autonomous vehicles coming for their work. The contractors who trained ChatGPT have unionized. All over the country, the people whose labor is being converted into another person’s profit are saying the same thing. Not like this.

So keep dreaming. Your dream is your leverage.

The people who told us to be afraid were counting on us to forget we could want more.

We want more.

I will be writing more about AI. I am releasing two pieces of work soon.

The first is a paper I’ve been writing with the Economic Security Project on recovering wages and wealth — an argument that decades of suppressed pay are a debt owed to working people, and a proposal for how to begin paying it back.

The second is Workers First AI, a project I co-lead with Andy Stern on how new technology and even automation can benefit workers. We’re working with rideshare drivers to put force behind those ideas.

Subscribe if you want to see them when they land.