For most of recorded history, the value of human work has been more than a way to earn a living. It has been the bedrock of political voice, a source of leverage over those in power, and often the reason rights could be demanded and defended at all. In periods when workers were scarce, wages tended to rise, bargaining power increased, and whole societies recalibrated their social contracts. When labor was plentiful and cheap, those same rights often stalled or eroded.
Now, we face something entirely new. Artificial intelligence has the potential to create a vast surplus of labor capacity without adding a single human being. Not by sending more people into the workforce, but by building machines that can do much of what we do — in some cases faster, cheaper, and at scale. This is not the cyclical slack of a recession or the temporary oversupply of a migration wave. If it happens at the breadth many anticipate, it will be the first sustained, technology-driven abundance of “workers” in history.
The immediate fear is job loss. The deeper problem is what happens to rights when the economic and political bargaining power that has historically protected them begins to vanish. Constitutions and laws may proclaim rights, but in practice, they are enforced by people who have the means to insist on them. If those means weaken, so might the rights themselves.
The Core Economic Loop
Stripped to its essentials, there are three ways the relationship between AI, labor, and rights can play out:
- Substitution-Dominant — AI replaces a large share of human work, reducing labor demand and bargaining power. Without deliberate intervention, rights risk erosion.
- Augmentation-Dominant — AI primarily enhances rather than replaces human labor, increasing productivity and resources to strengthen rights.
- Institutional Decoupling — Rights are maintained through laws, political structures, or cultural norms that no longer depend on labor market conditions.
These three outcomes form a kind of closed loop within the economic frame: any AI-labor scenario can be described as living inside one of these states, moving between them, or existing as a hybrid of more than one. A profession might start in augmentation, shift toward substitution as AI capabilities advance, and then be stabilized through institutional protections. The direction and speed of those shifts will determine the long-term balance of power.
Beyond the Economic Frame
But rights are not only shaped by labor markets. Other pathways exist — and to ignore them is to miss the full picture.
- Alternative Power-Base Dominance — A population may retain rights through non-economic leverage: civilian arms ownership, mass mobilization capacity, control over critical physical infrastructure, or even distributed digital capabilities such as encryption and autonomous drones. In this state, bargaining power comes not from economic indispensability but from the ability to impose costs on those who would curtail rights.
- Supersession — Rights do not erode; they are overtaken by entirely new governance systems in which the old rights frameworks no longer apply. This could be corporate AI governance supplanting state authority, or autonomous systems enforcing order without reference to human law.
By setting these two additional states alongside the economic loop, we acknowledge that rights can survive or fail for reasons outside of wages, productivity, and bargaining power. They can be maintained by raw coercive potential in the hands of the population, or rendered irrelevant if the very structure of authority changes.
What This Series Will Do
Over the chapters ahead, we will test each of these states — not as predictions, but as possibilities. We will examine the historical record of labor scarcity and abundance, and the conditions under which each led to rights expansion or contraction. We will look at how AI changes the mechanics of substitution and augmentation, and what it would take for institutional decoupling to work in practice. We will explore how alternative power bases can preserve rights, and whether supersession is a serious risk or science fiction.
The aim is not to insist on a single future, but to map the terrain so clearly that when the future arrives, we will recognize which path we are on. Only then can we decide whether we are content to follow it, or whether we should be building the road somewhere else.