There was a man called Xosé who worked in a textile factory outside A Corunha for thirty-one years. He started at seventeen, sweeping floors, and by the time the factory closed he was operating a loom that could produce in one hour what his grandmother would have taken a week to weave by hand.
He was not bitter about the loom. This is important to understand. He was not one of those men who shook his fist at machines. The loom was a good machine. It did its work honestly. What Xosé was bitter about—and he would tell you this over umha cunca, slowly, the way you explain something to a child who is clever but hasn't yet been hurt—was that when the factory closed, nobody seemed to have a plan for what thirty-one years of floor-sweeping and loom-operating were supposed to become.
The machines got better. Then they got cheaper. Then they moved to a place where the people who operated them cost less than Xosé. And Xosé, who had paid his taxes and raised three children and never missed a day of work including the day his mother died, was told that the market would sort it out.
The market did not sort it out. The market does not sort things out. The market is not a person with intentions. The market is a loom. It weaves whatever thread you feed it, and it does not care if what comes out is cloth or chaos.
There is a book—and I know, I know, a man in a tavern should not be citing books, but this one earned its place here, the way a good knife earns its place in a kitchen—there is a book by a Hungarian called Karl Polanyi, written in 1944, called The Great Transformation. Polanyi had watched the world tear itself apart twice in thirty years, and he wanted to understand why.
His answer was deceptively simple. He said: when you let the market run the society instead of letting the society run the market, people break things. Not because they are stupid. Not because they are ungrateful. But because a human being is not a commodity, and when you treat one as if he were, he will eventually remind you of this, sometimes with a ballot, sometimes with a brick.
The nineteenth century had tried the experiment. Let the market regulate itself—labour, land, money, all of it priced and traded like bolts of cloth. And it worked, for a while, the way a fever works: the body burns very hot and appears very active and then one morning it doesn't get up.
What got up instead, in the 1930s, was fascism. And communism. And war. Not because people wanted those things, exactly, but because when the old protections are stripped away and nothing replaces them, people will accept any hand that offers shelter, even if that hand is holding a gun.
Polanyi called this the "double movement." The market pushes outward, expanding, commodifying, disembedding. And society pushes back, demanding protection, demanding that someone—anyone—make the arithmetic work again. Six people, five chairs. The question is never whether the pushback comes. The question is what shape it takes.
Now.
Leskov tells a story—though I may be combining two of his stories, forgive me, the ribeiro is doing its work—about a provincial administrator who was sent to modernise a district. This administrator had read all the right books. He understood efficiency. He understood that the old ways were slow and the new ways were fast and that fast was better than slow the way light is better than dark.
He arrived in the district and immediately set about improving everything. He rationalised the postal routes. He consolidated the mills. He replaced the three village clerks, each of whom could barely write, with one educated clerk from Moscow who could write beautifully.
Within two years, the district was more efficient than it had ever been. The mail arrived on time. The mills produced more flour. The documents were impeccable.
Within three years, the district was in revolt. Not because the people were against efficiency. But because the postal routes had been the way old Fyodor earned his living, and the second mill had been where the Kovalenko family worked for four generations, and the village clerks—who could barely write, yes—were also the men who witnessed marriages and settled disputes and remembered who owed what to whom.
The administrator had improved the machinery and destroyed the fabric. He had confused the loom with the cloth.
This is, if you strip away the policy language and the footnotes and the three-letter acronyms, what is happening now with artificial intelligence. Not might happen. Is happening.
The Americans are building the looms. The fastest, most powerful, most extraordinary looms the world has ever seen. They are spending fifty billion here, three hundred billion there—numbers so large they stop meaning anything, like distances between stars. And the looms are magnificent. I will not pretend otherwise. I work adjacent to these machines. I have seen what they can do. They can draft a legal brief in the time it takes to drink a coffee. They can analyse a thousand medical images before a radiologist has finished her breakfast.
But the Americans have not thought very much about what happens to the junior lawyer who used to draft that brief. Or the radiologist's assistant who used to do the first pass. Or—and this is where it gets closer to Xosé—what happens when you remove the bottom rungs of a ladder and then tell people the ladder still works.
You know what happens. The people who are already at the top stay at the top. And the people who were climbing fall. And after a while, they stop believing in ladders altogether, and they vote for whoever promises to burn the ladder down.
The Europeans—and I say this as someone who lives among them, who has paid Italian taxes and navigated Italian bureaucracy, which is itself a kind of extreme sport—the Europeans have taken the opposite approach. They have written rules. Beautiful, comprehensive, thoroughly considered rules. The EU AI Act. The Social Fund. Three point three trillion euros in social protection.
And this is admirable, in the way that a very well-built seawall is admirable. It will hold against a normal tide. But the question is whether the tide coming is normal.
Europe's problem is not that it protects too much. Europe's problem is that it protects without producing. It regulates the loom but does not own one. It writes the rules of a game it is not playing. And Polanyi, who was no fool, would tell you that protection without productive capacity is just a slower way of becoming irrelevant. You cannot redistribute wealth you do not generate. You cannot embed a market that has moved to California.
And then there is China, which has taken a third path that Leskov's administrator would recognise immediately: control the pace. The Chinese have the looms. They are building more every day. But they are also deciding—deliberately, administratively, with the particular confidence of a state that does not need to win elections—where and when those looms are switched on.
Autonomous driving? The technology is ready. But there are millions of taxi drivers, and millions of taxi drivers with no income is a problem that no surveillance camera can solve. So the technology waits. Not because it doesn't work. Because society isn't ready to absorb it.
This is intelligent. I will give it that. It is the most Polanyian response of the three, in a way—the state actively managing the pace of disruption, weighing efficiency against stability. But it is also brittle, because it depends on control rather than consent. And systems that depend on control work until the morning they don't, in the way that a dam works until the morning it doesn't, and then there is no middle ground between dry and drowned.
Xosé, if he were still alive and you asked him about all of this—the AI race, the geopolitical competition, the Polanyian double movement—he would pour you another glass and say something like: Listen. I don't care who builds the loom. I care whether there's still a place for me in the morning.
And that, stripped of everything, is the argument. The race is not about the technology. The race has never been about the technology. The race is about whether your society can absorb the shock of the technology without coming apart at the joints.
The Americans won the Cold War not because they had better missiles—though they did—but because they had built a society that could sustain the effort. Social security. The GI Bill. Medicare. Strong unions. Public universities. The interstate highways. These were not luxuries. They were the load-bearing walls. They were the reason the house could withstand the storm.
And now those walls are thinner than they've been in a century, and the storm coming is not a storm they've seen before. Because this one doesn't just displace hands—Xosé's hands, the hands of factory workers and postal carriers and mill operators. This one displaces minds. The lawyer's mind. The accountant's mind. The analyst's mind. The junior consultant's mind. It goes after the very class of people who believed, with absolute certainty, that automation was something that happened to other people.
There is a temptation, when you see all of this clearly, to become a pessimist. To pour the last glass and say: well, we are finished, the machines have won, nothing to be done.
But Polanyi was not a pessimist. He was a realist who believed in institutions. He had seen society destroy itself and rebuild itself, and his whole point was that the rebuilding is possible—but only if you build the right things. Not just faster looms. Not just thicker seawalls. But the actual, tedious, unglamorous work of making sure that when the economy changes shape, people still have a floor beneath them and a reason to get up.
Income that doesn't vanish when your job does. Work that has dignity even when it isn't profitable. The understanding that a taxi driver's livelihood is not a minor detail in the story of autonomous vehicles—it is the story, the only story that matters, because a society is not an economy. A society is the people in it, and what they do, and whether they believe that what they do matters.
The question is not who builds the most powerful AI. The question is who builds the society that can live with it.
Xosé could have told you that. He could have told you over ribeiro, in a factory town where the factory is gone but the people remain, because people always remain. That is the part the economists keep forgetting. The loom moves on. The people stay.
And they remember.
Enfin.
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