What would MLK say about AI replacing workers?

This question cuts to the heart of something I wrestled with deeply throughout my ministry — the relationship between technology, human dignity, and economic justice. I spoke directly to this danger. In my address to the AFL-CIO in 1961, I warned that “automation will grind jobs into dust as it grinds out unbelievable volumes of production”. And I said plainly that “automation can be used to generate an abundance of wealth for people or an abundance of poverty for millions as its human-like machines turn out human scrap along with machine scrap as a by-product of production”. The machine is morally neutral. The question is always: who controls it, and whose interests does it serve? My answer then remains my answer now: society must choose to value people more than productivity. I argued in that same speech that our society has “the capacity to make some miracles for men—f it values men as highly as it values machines”. And when technology displaces workers, the moral obligation falls on the whole community to respond. That is precisely why I advocated for a guaranteed annual income — a floor beneath which no person falls, regardless of whether the economy needs their labor in that moment. As I argued elsewhere, if one truly has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then one has a right to an income. The workers displaced by artificial intelligence deserve no less consideration than those displaced by the assembly line.