Sparks: California’s new laws target workers’ biggest fear of AI taking their jobs

What we now call 'artificial intelligence' was, before the lawmakers named it, merely a bundle of unexamined labours, and only a discipline that names its own subject can be governed by a law that knows what it is regulating.

The regulation is reported as a labour story, but trace the web: the same machines that displace the worker also concentrate capital in one valley, and the displacement, the concentration, and the legislation answering both form a single system no single statistic reveals.

As water finds the lowest channel regardless of the miller's wishes, so the machine finds the task it can perform, and the law that would redirect the current must first understand the slope it is working against.

Note the provenance: the legislators catalogue what the machines may not do, but no observer has recorded which tasks were actually displaced and under what conditions, so the law measures a phenomenon nobody has yet surveyed.

The lawmakers promise to protect the worker's job, and yet, if they cannot say what a job is - the skill, the wage, the dignity, or all three - how will they know what they have protected?

Trace the 'protection of workers' to its origin and you find not strength but fear - the herd demanding the machine be slowed so that no one is forced to become more than he is.

All I know is what I read in the papers: the state that built the thinking machines has now passed a law asking them politely not to think anybody out of a job.

We could design the automated system so its gains flow to the whole grid instead of a single substation; instead we legislate at the switch, one fuse at a time, and call the flickering progress.

In the cities where the machines are made I am told the judges now rule on what the machines may take, and I note the traveller finds no such court between Delhi and Fez, where the loom took the weaver without a hearing.

'Laws target workers' biggest fear of AI taking their jobs' - note the syntax: the machine takes, the worker fears, and the law merely targets the fear, as though the terror were the offence and the taking merely its occasion.

Things that are hateful: a law that arrives after the machine has already learned the task; a protection announced with great ceremony for a job already gone; a headline comforting the fearful instead of the harmed.

There is a fence around the worker's livelihood, built by men who remembered the Luddites were not wrong about the hunger but only about the machinery, and the reformers pulling it down cannot say why it was built.