AI doomerism and neo-Luddite sentiments have become increasingly prevalent in recent discourse. Given the remarkable things that technological progress has made possible for us, one would think that the Luddite fallacy would have died by now. Nonetheless, it is alive and well.
Matt Walsh—A Neo-Luddite
Reactionary theocrat and commentator Matt Walsh has been no exception to this trend. In a recent post on X (formerly Twitter), Walsh wrote:
People say that we shouldn’t worry about AI wiping out jobs. The jobs will just change, they say. But the whole point of AI is that it removes the human component entirely. The jobs aren’t going to change. They’ll just disappear. AI will make like ten people into trillionaires. Almost everyone else will be screwed. Mass unemployment. Millions of workers rendered irrelevant all at once. That’s what’s going to happen. Not maybe. Not might. It’s going to happen. And it doesn’t seem like we’re doing anything at all to prepare for it.
Walsh appears to hold that humans will no longer be necessary due to AI over time—that there will be no more jobs to do, and that it will benefit a small elite at everyone else’s expense. In response to Walsh’s post, David Brady quipped, “Don’t you think people said the same thing about the automobile?” Walsh replied:
No. AI is not at all like going from a carriage to a car. Both the carriage and the car needed a human to drive them. It’s just that with the car the human is going faster and farther. AI removes the human from the equation completely. That’s what people aren’t grasping. This technology is different in kind from anything else that has ever existed or ever been invented in the entire history of humanity. Prior to this, we invented better tools for humans to use. Now the tool has its own brain and doesn’t need humans at all.
Walsh emphasizes that humans won’t be needed at all, and that is what makes artificial intelligence uniquely pernicious compared to other technological advances, which merely augmented rather than replaced humans and their labor. The erroneous assumption made by Walsh is that humans will no longer be needed. Machines are capital goods. Capital goods, by definition, are produced means of production and are non-permanent resources—not original means. Additionally, outside of pure entrepreneurial profit and interest for supplying present goods, the owners of capital goods earn no net income from a given production process. Income accrued to capital goods is reducible to rent to land, interest to capitalists for supplying present goods, wages for labor, and entrepreneurial profit. Thus, to produce capital goods, labor factors are required.
To maintain the structure of capital to counteract depreciation, savings and investment are required. Moreover, if Walsh is correct that humans will no longer be needed for the production of commodities (and it is impossible for him to be correct, as I have shown), due to a large supply of highly sophisticated capital (such as humanoid robots) and therefore consumer goods, then that would be amazing! We would basically live in the Garden of Eden.
The purpose of production is for consumption. If we could consume so much that working made such a trivial impact on one’s standard of living, then this would be a future to get excited about. Humans would have a great deal of leisure. Clearly, however, this is not what Walsh means. He most likely holds that if you want a job, you won’t be able to get one. The issue with this, of course, is that the marginal product of labor will not be zero. There will be some contribution to output that one may provide. In fact, more advanced technology and machinery will increase the marginal product of labor and thus its remuneration. Barring a binding price floor on the labor, it will be able to find employment. If goods became so abundant that labor had no marginal revenue productivity, then economic goods would not exist, and so we would be in the Garden of Eden.
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