Posted on June 17, 2025
If you are a programmer in 2025 you have likely been pressured into adopting generative artificial intelligence tools into your workflow. Maybe you have already been ordered to. You have probably wondered if next year will be the year that you will be replaced with an AI. Or maybe in the next five years. Weren’t we supposed to be replaced already?
I do not doubt that people using these tools enjoy using them. If you are one of those folks this post isn’t aimed to, “yuck in your yum.” If you find yourself reading this for some reason, thank you, and don’t worry — your golden goose is going to be fine.
I do intend to cover the moral and ethical reasons why I don’t use AI tools in my work. Perhaps you have also considered these issues. Perhaps you can empathize with them.
On Labour
I’m a labourer. A well-compensated one with plenty of bargaining power, for now. I don’t make my living profiting from capital. I have to sell my time, body, and expertise like everyone else in order to make the profits needed to support me and my family with life’s necessities.
There is no social policy or system that protects me from my current or future employers from trying to replace me with AI. The myth of capitalism around disruptive technology suggests that I will find new skills and employment in other areas of the economy. Unfortunately things don’t always go this way.
The Luddite movement is an interesting piece of history. People often remember the part about breaking machines in factories. Today, people refer to those who refuse to use new productivity-enhancing technology as, Luddites. But the movement was not about sabotage. At least, it had a purpose and sabotage was only one strategy used by people to try and enact change and gain bargaining power.
You see, there were no social policies or reforms in place to protect the rights of labourers during the industrial revolution in which the Luddite movement had formed. The people involved in the movement were skilled workers who used the machines they were destroying. They weren’t destroying the machines because they wanted everyone to make textiles by hand: they were protesting the fact that capital owners were extracting the wealth from their labour with this new technology and weren’t reinvesting it to protect the labourers displaced by it.
Today, AI technology is being used to replace labour power with capital. The knowledge work we do is being replaced with machines and algorithms by capital holders who want to own and rent out access to that knowledge. It’s cheaper, produces more value, and that new wealth is not turning into shorter working hours or supplementing any labourer’s income. That wealth is going into the hands of the ultra wealthy.
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