AI Lays Bare the Authoritarianism of Modern Work. Time to Rethink Education

Perspective

AI Lays Bare the Authoritarianism of Modern Work. Time to Rethink Education.

Velislava Hillman, Peter G. Kirchschlaeger / Jul 15, 2026

Leo 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.”

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.

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.

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.

AI now bypasses the original logic of the educational bargain altogether.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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 was helping contain inflation in the United States. Workers, he observed, had become too fearful of job loss and technological obsolescence to demand higher wages even during periods of economic growth. Job insecurity, Greenspan explained, had become more important than wage gains.

Anxiety and weakened bargaining power function as sustaining features of the economic system itself. As the labor historian Norman Ware argued nearly a century ago in The Industrial Worker, this subordination of labor was not an accidental by-product of industrialization but one of its organizing principles. A “healthy” economy, in this view, depends to a significant degree on workers feeling too insecure to resist deteriorating conditions. Put otherwise, much of what young generations experience is not accidental, but part of an economic model whose beneficiaries depend on precisely that insecurity.

The logic of insecurity now extends deeply into education itself. Universities mirror many of these same dynamics. Students accumulate extraordinary levels of debt in exchange for no clear guarantee of stability or professional security. In the United States, federal student debt has surpassed $1.7 trillion. In England, graduates leave university with some of the highest student debt levels in the world: the average borrower entering repayment in 2024 owed around £53,000, while total outstanding student debt has reached £267 billion.

The question, then, is what kind of education would make sense now?

Higher education institutions were historically understood as spaces where independent judgement, critical inquiry and participation in public life could be cultivated with some degree of autonomy from political and economic pressures. That tradition now feels deeply fragile, particularly as commercial AI systems move rapidly into educational infrastructures with remarkably little democratic scrutiny. The more education is organized around employability, the harder it becomes to sustain forms of thought capable of questioning the very systems students are being prepared to enter in the first place.

The question is no longer simply what kind of education society needs, but whether education still serves democratic life or merely prepares people to function inside the ‘private tyrannies’ Chomsky described. An economy organized around permanent insecurity produces its own educational logic: short-termism, compliance and relentless adaptation to systems presented as inevitable.

But education worthy of the name must offer something else. Not simply the acquisition of skills, but the ability to recognize concentrations of power, recognize systems presented as natural, resist manipulation and think independently and critically within rapidly automating environments and live up to the exclusive human responsibility to shape ethical AI and technological processes. These forms of judgement are becoming politically urgent precisely because they are difficult to automate. Perhaps this is what AI is revealing with unusual clarity: the crisis facing younger generations was never primarily technological, but political — a society that spent decades preparing people for increasingly insecure and undemocratic forms of work while continuing to present that as progress. The task of education now is not to train people to adapt to those conditions, but to question and even refuse them.

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Authors

Velislava Hillman

Dr. Velislava Hillman is founder and director of EDDS Institute. She is a research scholar and lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London with focus on AI, education and technology governance.

Peter G. Kirchschlaeger

Peter G. Kirchschlaeger is Professor of Ethics and Director of the Institute of Social Ethics ISE at the University of Lucerne, Visiting Professor at ETH Zurich, Visiting Fellow at the University of Tuebingen, and Research Fellow at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein in South Africa. He ...

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