Fear and AI: How not to sacrifice humanity at the altar of gross margin
Among tech leaders, optimism around AI is skyrocketing.
Among the general public? Not so much.
Survey after survey shows increasing pessimism over the future of AI, with fear surrounding job loss and the weakening of human skills. Across business sectors, jobs are already being slashed.
For the first eight months of 2025, rising adoption of generative AI by private employers accounted for more than 17,000 job cuts in the U.S., according to a report by careers services firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Two-thirds of Gen Zers believe AI will replace their jobs in the next five years, and 37% of people globally across all age groups hold that same worry, the Ipsos AI Monitor found.
In a 2025 Pew report, 66% of U.S. adults say they are highly concerned that people will get inaccurate information from AI systems. The same study reports 57% of the public are highly concerned that AI will lead to less connection between people.
Among AI experts, the difference is night-and-day.
56% of AI experts believe AI will have a positive effect on the world in the next 20 years; among the general public, that figure is only 17%. And 76% of those experts believe the technology will benefit them personally, compared to just 24% among the general public.
It’s clear that despite the worry, this technology is not going away, and its growth and adoption are only picking up speed. But humans are not going anywhere either, employed or not; and history tells us that society can go in a number of drastically different directions depending on how that tech is implemented — and who benefits from it.
Lessons from the past
History is fraught with lessons of times when capital did not share the gains of productivity with labor. Fundamental shifts in productivity — take the Industrial Revolution — led to immense wealth for a powerful minority, and widespread suffering for workers, eventually giving birth to ideologies like communism.
The founding father of communism himself, Karl Marx, wrote Das Kapital in 1867. In it he laid out a picture of economy and society that eerily parallels today’s debates about AI automation, ownership of algorithms and data, and the concentration of wealth among those who control the “digital means of production.”
“All progress in increasing the productivity of labour… is simultaneously a progress in the art of robbing the labourer of his product,” Marx wrote in his book. Bringing that to the present day, it means that the more efficient generative AI becomes, the greater the profit margin for those who own it — and the less bargaining power for the human producers whose work it replaces.
We cannot afford to sacrifice humanity on the altar of gross margin. At Applied AI, we believe in the fundamental role of humans to supervise, guide, and regulate AI — and to share its gains so that humanity as a whole benefits.
We are facing an existential angst for our species, with what is probably one of the few solutions that actually incorporates our species — and it must continue to do so.
Human talent is crucial to innovation and creativity, and human oversight is irreplaceable in a world where accuracy and ethics matter.
That is why we built Opus. Not to take away your job; but to unleash your productivity. To cut out all the hours of manual, tedious, repetitive tasks that keep you in the office late and prevent you and your team from tapping into greater ideas and doing what you love. To give you your time back while keeping you in control.
Opus is the first AI-native platform for supervised automation that delivers reliable, outcome-driven execution for complex business workflows — combining human-in-the-loop oversight with AI autonomy to drive real productivity at scale. Providing full audit trails and transparent reasoning, AI agents do the grunt work while humans maintain accountability.
There has to be a solution that puts humans first — and on a broader level, a plan for the ethical allocation of this new wealth that was built on the backs and the data of billions of people.
We're not saying Opus is the solution, but at least it's a solution. There is a home, a place for human review, oversight, and input.
If productivity gains from AI are not shared with labour and the public, society will replicate — and magnify — the crises of wealth overaccumulation and inequality Marx diagnosed 150 years ago.