AI Lays Bare the Authoritarianism of Modern Work. Time to Rethink Education. | TechPolicy.PressPerspective<br>AI Lays Bare the Authoritarianism of Modern Work. Time to Rethink Education.<br>Velislava Hillman, Peter G. Kirchschlaeger / Jul 15, 2026Leo Lau, Wheel of Progress, CC-BY 4.0.
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Noam Chomsky once observed that most people spend much of their lives in totalitarian systems. That system, he said, “is called having a job.”<br>In most workplaces, individuals exercise little meaningful democratic control over the conditions governing their existence: salary, working hours, surveillance, behavior. People are normally free to leave, but generally only on the condition that they subordinate themselves elsewhere. The alternative is starvation. In practice, most people spend the greater part of their lives inside institutions they don’t control. Trade unions and labor protections have mitigated some of these conditions through long political struggle, but the underlying structure of top-down authority in the majority of workplaces has remained largely intact.<br>For decades, the dominant education policy in most of the world rested on a relatively simple promise rooted in so-called human capital theory: accumulate qualifications, acquire technical skills, adapt continuously to the economy, and security through professional work would follow.<br>Yet the promised outcomes are becoming harder to see. Across wealthy economies, university participation has reached historic highs while the labor-market advantage associated with higher education has eroded. Young graduates face one of the weakest entry-level labor markets in decades. Unemployment among Americans aged 22-27 reached 5.3%, while more than half of US graduates work in jobs that don’t need degrees. In Britain, only 60.4% of graduates aged 21-30 are employed in high-skilled occupations while 42% of university-educated workers outside London work in jobs that don’t require a degree, up from 31% in 1993.<br>AI now bypasses the original logic of the educational bargain altogether.<br>The industries that spent years encouraging young people towards technical and professional careers are shedding workers at remarkable speed. Meta announced thousands of layoffs while redirecting resources towards AI infrastructure and automation. Amazon, after years of promoting engineering and computer science through initiatives such as Amazon Future Engineer, simultaneously cut tens of thousands of corporate jobs as AI expands across its operations. Oracle workers recently described mass layoffs in brutally impersonal terms: “Everyone’s a line on a spreadsheet.” A 2026 Stanford AI Index report also documents sharp reductions in entry-level hiring, raising obvious questions about how younger workers are expected to acquire experience in the first place. Previous waves of technological change largely complemented human labor while creating new industries and occupations. AI today is increasingly being deployed to substitute for human work itself – reaching far beyond routine or low-skilled tasks and eroding the professional pathways education was designed to prepare people for. Yet much of the policy response continues to assume that the central challenge is simply preparing more people for the labor market.<br>Two recent policy reports in the UK captured the scale of the problem. One, a major inquiry by the Skills Commission on young people not in education, employment or training, warned that Britain now faces a “generational challenge”, with close to one million young people outside both work and education, rising levels of mental ill health, collapsing youth services and deepening insecurity around transitions into adult life. The other, former chair of Social Mobility Foundation Alan Milburn’s government-commissioned report, points to a “rising tide of mental ill-health, anxiety, depression and neurodiversity” as a major factor behind growing economic inactivity.<br>Yet both frame the solution largely through employability, skills pipelines, apprenticeships and labor-market participation, as though the central task were simply integrating people more efficiently into an economic model that is already producing widespread precarity.<br>Our content delivered to your inbox.<br>Join our newsletter on issues and ideas at the intersection of tech & democracy
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Moreover, education policy still treats economic participation as the central purpose of the entire education system, while continuing to push digitization ever further across schools and universities and presenting digital participation and AI integration as unquestioned educational necessities.<br>What rarely gets discussed, however, is that this insecurity has long served the interests of those who benefit most from the existing economic order. In the late 1990s, the late Alan Greenspan, former chair of the US Federal Reserve, argued that worker insecurity...