by Matthew Gorman
“Slavery was a power in the State Greater than the State itself.” When Frederick Douglas said this during his 1877 speech “Remembering the Civil War,” the U.S. South was in the last year of the Reconstruction Era, transitioning its broken slave-based economy into a free-labor system.
Rather than employing free laborers, plantation owners primarily elected to continue to use what was in effect slave labor. Job growth was stagnant, but plantation owners continued to see profits. Cheap labor allowed for owners to maximize their profits.
Such is the same with artificial intelligence. We live in a capitalist society, and free labor rather than paid labor allows for maximum profits. If we allow AI to grow and expand in influence, without regulation, it will only lead to an AI-based economy with workers losing their jobs to robots.
Plantation owners were willing to wage a war to continue the system of slavery, and we have to expect big business to do the same. We can not allow AI to take away jobs, even if AI is more profitable than employing real people.
Because the Southern economy was based on enslaved labor, job growth was stagnant for free laborers. Based on research from the Washington Center, between 1833 and 1859, enslaved workers’ economic output for slave owners was increasing dramatically, while the economic output of Southerners who did not own slaves was falling. There was no profitable reason for industrialization, since enslaved labor was so successful. If AI is left to grow unchecked, businesses will only employ AI labor, and there will be no reason for businesses to diversify their product, and employ new skilled workers as a result.
The lack of job availability in the Antebellum South was due to slavery, and there was no economical reason to change the system, since it benefited the rich. When there is no incentive to employ paid laborers, the rich will refuse, and employ unpaid workers who will work around the clock to satisfy the needs of the business, a form of work very similar to the job of AI.
Such a dilemma is as evident today as it was then; the economic impact of AI and slavery are one and the same. Plantation owners and the Southern elite did not want slavery to be controlled or limited. They wanted their economy to flourish with the domestic free trade of enslaved individuals.
For AI, much is the same. Businesses are going to continue to replace human labor with AI. If AI is not controlled, and limited, it is only going to threaten the lives of the average American worker. According to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute, by 2030, approximately 2.4 million U.S. workers will have their jobs replaced by AI. We have seen it in the past; when employers have no incentive to employ a worker, they will not.
We live in a capitalist society, and if profits are the main goal, then AI will become the main breadwinner, not the American worker. AI does have extraordinary benefits. Its potential to accelerate breakthroughs in medicine, from curing cancer to decoding Alzheimer’s, could be life-changing. But AI’s growth must be focused on solving problems humans cannot solve, not replacing the livelihoods of those who rely on work to survive.
If we are to expand AI responsibly, we must view it through the same lens as the labor systems of the Antebellum South. The plantation economy, built on forced labor, eventually collapsed, not because it was inefficient, but because it was morally and socially unsustainable. The same fate awaits an AI-dominated economy if we fail to center ethics, regulation, and the dignity of the worker in its development.
The average Confederate soldier in the U.S. Civil War was a poor laborer, and not a plantation owner. Yet they fought to uphold a system that did not benefit them. Will AI, like slavery, be propped up by systems that convince the laboring class to fight for the very forces that erase their own economic vitality?
Matthew Gorman is a sophomore at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, studying international and public affairs and economics.
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Loved this clearly written, thought-provoking analogy.