Articles

Above is a photograph taken on Christmas Eve, 1968, by an astronaut named William Anders as the Apollo 8 capsule swung around the far side of the moon. In it, a small blue-and-white sphere hangs in absolute darkness above a grey and lifeless lunar horizon. We call it Earthrise. It is the most reproduced photograph in history, and the reason is not its technical quality. The reason is what it shows: all of us. Every person who has ever lived. Every child ever born. Every act of love and every act of cruelty. Every civilization that rose and every one … Read more

Part One of a Series on the Coming Labour Disruption The Promise Nobody Should Believe Something curious is happening in boardrooms, earnings calls, and corporate communications the world over. Companies that have spent decades demonstrating an almost clinical indifference to the fate of their workers are positioning themselves as guardians of the human workforce in the age of artificial intelligence. The language is warm, the pledges are generous, and the photography in the press releases is positively luminous. Reskilling. Upskilling. Human-AI collaboration. We are, apparently, all in this together. The evidence suggests otherwise. This is not cynicism for its own … Read more

Part Two of a Series on the Coming Labour Disruption The Comforting Error The most common mistake people make when thinking about artificial intelligence and work is to assume that if their own role cannot be directly automated, they are therefore relatively safe. The electrician assumes this because wiring a building requires physical presence, fine motor coordination, and adaptation to messy real-world conditions. The nurse assumes it because care is relational and embodied. The plumber assumes it because pipes do not repair themselves through a chatbot. The teacher assumes it because classrooms are social environments, not merely information transfer systems. … Read more

Part Three of a Series on the Coming Labour Disruption The Fiscal Foundation and Its Flaw Modern states are, at their core, fiscal machines. They provide services—education, healthcare, infrastructure, defence, social support—in exchange for revenue extracted from economic activity. The architecture of that revenue system was designed around a specific and now-challenged assumption: that most economic value flows through human labour, and that labour can be taxed where it is performed. Income tax, payroll tax, social security contributions, sales taxes paid by wage earners—the vast majority of government revenue in every OECD country is directly or indirectly tied to employment … Read more

Part Four of a Series on the Coming Labour Disruption There Is a Tunnel This series began with a specific and limited argument: that corporate promises of workforce protection in the age of artificial intelligence have no credible historical basis and that competitive market mechanics make those promises structurally impossible to honour. It expanded to show that the secondary economic effects of mass displacement would reach sectors—education, healthcare, the trades, government employment—that had assumed themselves insulated. It then examined how the fiscal architecture of modern states, built on taxing labour, faces a structural revenue crisis when labour is systematically replaced … Read more

Part Five of a Series on the Coming Labour Disruption A Threshold Has Been Crossed On April 7, 2026, Anthropic made an announcement that should have commanded front pages across the world. It did not. The company stated, in technical language carefully chosen to be precise without being inflammatory, that its new model, Claude Mythos Preview, had “already identified high-severity vulnerabilities including some in every major operating system and web browser”—after a single user prompt, with minimal human direction (BBC, 2026). Anthropic further warned that “given the rapid advancements in AI, it won’t be long before such capabilities spread, potentially … Read more

The Comforting Story That Is Wrong Over the last year, a new kind of article has started to appear. It does not portray artificial intelligence as an existential threat, nor as a miracle cure. Instead, it focuses on disappointment. Executives report that AI initiatives have underperformed expectations. Pilot projects have struggled to move beyond experimentation. Organizations that anticipated rapid transformation often find themselves wrestling with integration challenges, governance concerns, data quality issues, and uncertain returns on investment (McKinsey & Company, 2024; Maslej et al., 2025). At the same time, a parallel narrative has emerged around the idea that the most … Read more

Part Six of a Series on the Coming Labour Disruption Another Comforting Story That Is Wrong It is easy to believe that AI is mostly a big-company problem. Most headlines are about global banks, tech giants, and governments. But when you look at where people actually work, the picture is very different. In Canada, small businesses employ a very large share of private-sector workers, and small and medium-sized enterprises together account for most private payroll employment (Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, 2026; Statistics Canada, 2025; Fraser Institute, 2025). The accountants, coaches, consultants, and local service firms this article is … Read more

Part of a Series on the Coming Labour Disruption There is a particular kind of professional confidence that deserves its own name. It is not arrogance, and it is not ignorance. It is the quiet, settled conviction — held by physicians, teachers, therapists, social workers, and others in the caring professions — that whatever is coming for the rest of the labour market will stop politely at their door. They have heard the warnings before. They have watched other sectors absorb disruption. And they have concluded, not unreasonably, that what they do is different: too human, too relational, too morally … Read more

“You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of reality.” — Ayn Rand I have spent the previous articles making the hardest case I know how to make. This is a synthesis of almost a decade of scholarship on my part. I have tried not to look away. I have tried not to soften the edges or round off the numbers or choose the more comfortable interpretation when the evidence pointed somewhere else. I have written about employers who will not protect you, about economies that cannot absorb the shock, about governments whose fiscal architecture was not built … Read more