NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {S} ome of those either making policy or looking to set it seem to be coming close to arguing that technology-based job elimination is something close to a human-rights abuse. Case in point: President Biden’s recent executive order on artificial intelligence (AI), which states that “irresponsible use” (of AI) includes “displac[ing] workers.” Heaven forbid that an organization uses AI to boost efficiency and reduce its workforce. The Biden administration is not alone: Advocacy groups, Nobel laureates, think tanks, pundits, journalists, and even Pope Francis all concur in their belief that AI should only complement workers and never displace them. This view is already influencing policy and practice, and if it grows, it will represent a fundamental threat to America’s economic prosperity.

From its Founding, America has always been pro-automation. In his “Report on Manufactures,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in reference to spinning machines that they use a “[smaller] number of [persons, in the whole]” and, as such, “the prodigious effect of such a Machine is easily conceived. To this invention is to be attributed essentially the immense progress.” A century and a half later, Harvard University economist Benjamin Anderson wrote that, “On no account, must we retard or interfere with the most rapid utilization of new inventions.” And it wasn’t just pro-market intellectuals who saw automation as a progressive force. Socialist Jack London warned the working man: “Let us not destroy these wonderful machines that produce efficiently and cheaply. Let us control them.” Socialists, Communists, and others on the left embraced automation because they believed that liberation could come about only when the problem of production had been solved, and that could only be achieved through mechanization.

Now, we live in a world where academics, pundits, and policy-makers fear that AI could replace some types of workers and want to ensure that it only aids them instead. MIT’s Industrial Performance Center issued a report in 2020 proposing five policies that could “steer AI development and implementation in a direction that complements humans and augments their skill.” The very thought that a truck driver, fast-food clerk, paralegal, or even lawyer, radiologist, or reporter might lose their job because of technology triggers fierce opposition. The capitalists are exploiting the worker! In reality, the capitalist is benefiting the consumer and society by helping America produce more.

Imagine if America had followed this counsel in the past. We’d still have telephone operators, but they would be aided by technology to help them manually switch calls. We’d have bank tellers using ATM machines to give customers cash. And we’d be like Garden State residents where gas-station-attendant jobs are protected, and we can’t pump our own gas and save ten to 20 cents a gallon. And we’d all be poorer.

If the techno-opponents get their way, we may all be living in “New Jersey.” New York mayor Bill DeBlasio wrote, “American workers need to be protected from automation,” and proposed an automation tax and regulator. MIT economist Daron Acemoglu wants Congress to impose a tax on automation equipment that cuts work hours. The Screen Actors Guild doesn’t want AI to create scripts.

The reality is that all AI applications that increase worker productivity are in the national interest, regardless of whether they complement or replace the worker. The reason is that higher productivity leads to increased output and GDP, and that is in the interest of all Americans. As such the choice of complement or replace should be left up to the organization deploying AI, not activists, unions, or government.

What’s behind this view that it is no longer acceptable for workers to lose their jobs because of technology? Let me suggest two reasons. First, the growth of inequality and loss of so many manufacturing jobs due to Chinese industrial predation in the last several decades has been a severe shock to the U.S. system, leaving behind the equivalent of economic PTSD. As such, we have seen the evolution of a politics of domestic protectionism where fear of change, and the desire for security, has become much more central to American thinking. Many argue that we can’t go through this kind of disruption again, even though the rate of job loss in the last two decades is among the lowest in U.S. history. So, let’s kill AI automation in the crib.

Second, and most important, is the shift in America and, more broadly, the West away from a focus on growth toward an embrace of no-growth or even degrowth to save the planet. From the founding of the republic through the turn of the millennium, America’s core economic creed was growth, an essential element in the United States becoming the world’s richest and most powerful nation, dramatically improving Americans’ quality of life along the way. Tragically, over the last two decades, many have abandoned their faith in growth, seeing it as destructive to the planet, empowering for the capitalists, and degrading to the soul.

There is an emerging view that we should forswear growth for the sake of other goals — saving the planet, redistributing income, living simply, and the like — because growth is no longer viewed as the solution to society’s problems, but the cause. As World Economic Forum head Klaus Schwab has written, “We never should have made GDP growth the singular focus on policy-making. Alas, that is where we are. GDP growth is our key measurement and has permanently slowed.” Leaving aside the fact that growth has never been the “singular” focus in policy-making anywhere, it’s not unreasonable to suspect that some of the opposition to AI-based automation flows from the fear that it could fuel a new upswing in per-capita economic growth, something now regarded with suspicion or worse.

This is not a view that should prevail. Economic growth was good, and is good. Workers of the world: Embrace AI automation. You have nothing to lose but your stagnant wages.