Resistance to artificial intelligence has often taken the form of shaming people for personally using it, with little organizing against the companies building the machines. This is perplexing, given that those companies are attempting to render us obsolete.
Industry's goal is to replace humans
Executives may offer bromides about how AI will augment human work or how we'll simply find new jobs, but their clear goals are to create systems that surpass our abilities. OpenAI defines its north star of artificial general intelligence (AGI) as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work”. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei writes: “AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.”
The industry's ultimate ambition is better understood as a universal labor-replacing machine. These systems would do any work a human could do from a remote desk, leaving livelihoods safe only where a human touch is preferred, a physical presence is required, or jobs are legally protected.
Shaming users is a gift to the industry
In many corners of the internet, especially on the left, people pride themselves on never touching the technology while making bold, deeply mistaken claims about its nature and capabilities. Using what is increasingly an indispensable technology is not an endorsement of the industry building it, any more than using Instagram to advocate for aggressive regulations on social media would endorse Mark Zuckerberg's empire.
People using AI are going to outcompete those who don't, bending the world in their preferred direction while forming a deeper understanding of the technology. Bosses will use Claude Code to replace workers, while the leftist policy analyst Matt Bruenig is having it build a publicly accessible, automatically updating database of National Labor Relations Board decisions.
The popularity of stigmatizing individual AI usage has been a gift to the industry, fracturing would-be opponents and activating our identities as consumers. When we think as consumers, the goal becomes minimizing our own complicity. We should instead think as citizens: how do we democratically govern this technology in the public interest?
Urgent need for left engagement
Sixty-nine active members of Congress have publicly used terms like artificial superintelligence, the Singularity and AI existential risk. If certain techies are the only people willing to acknowledge that the technology's capabilities have dramatically improved and could pose a species-level threat, that's who concerned policymakers will disproportionately listen to.
Joshua Achiam, then OpenAI's chief futurist, declared: “The left has completely abdicated their role in this discussion. A decade from now, this will be understood on the left to have been a generational mistake; perhaps even more than merely generational.” Dean Ball, who led the authorship of Trump's AI action plan before becoming an executive at OpenAI, declared: “Joshua is right.”
Right now, AI is being governed by unelected, unaccountable tech billionaires, subject to intense pressures from shareholders and the Trump administration. To change this status quo, we'll need to build a movement powerful enough to defeat the richest industry in history.
Organizing for democratic control
Garrison Lovely, author of Obsolete: The AI Industry's Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us – and How to Stop It, suggests starting at Irreplaceable.org, a non-profit founded by veterans of the climate movement. It aims to meet people where they are, organize their anger into political power, and build a coalition strong enough to win democratic control over AI. The non-profit is organizing a national walkout to Freeze AI on 20 October.
Lovely writes: “I have no illusions that a day of walkouts will solve our AI problems. But it will bring together people with shared concerns, and some of them will become the friendships that sustain successful movements. Most of all, we'll need to keep our eye on the ball: the companies trying to render us obsolete, not the friends and neighbors using their products.”
