Jesse Martin

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 … 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 … 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 … 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 … 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 … 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 … 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. … 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 … 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 … 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 … Read more