Nobody budgeted for the humans

Forty-seven thousand Samsung workers want a cut of the profit their labour generates from AI chip demand. That demand is the centrepiece of a looming strike, and it's the kind of line item that doesn't appear in any AI roadmap. Nobody budgeted for the humans.

The AI industry has a peculiar relationship with labour. It depends on it utterly: someone has to fabricate the chips, label the data, write the training material. It promises to eliminate it imminently: Mustafa Suleyman predicts that all white-collar work will be automated within 18 months. And it increasingly forbids the people it hasn't yet replaced from touching its own tools: the New York Times has warned its freelancers against using generative AI in their work.

Three stories, one contradiction: the humans are simultaneously the bottleneck, the target, and the liability.

The supply chain has opinions

Samsung's dispute is worth watching not because strikes are unusual in South Korean labour relations, but because of the context. AI chip demand has been a windfall, and the workers building those chips want their share of it. South Korea's president has urged a deal before the walkout begins. But if the strike holds, it touches a supply chain that every major AI company relies on.

This is the kind of risk that rarely appears in investor decks. The entire AI thesis rests on scaling compute, and scaling compute rests on physical fabrication by workers who have their own views about how the value gets distributed. The AI boom inherited a lesson the oil industry learned decades ago: extracting value from a supply chain works until the people inside it organise around the same price signal you're chasing.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the chain, Suleyman's prediction that all white-collar work will be automated within 18 months is striking less for its ambition than for its confidence that the transition will be frictionless. Forty-seven thousand fabrication workers preparing to walk off the job suggest otherwise.

And then there's the New York Times, which has warned its freelancers against using generative AI in their work. The publication wants its contributors to pretend the tools don't exist. It's a defensible legal posture and an absurd working condition at the same time.

The pattern here isn't hypocrisy. It's mispricing. Every layer of the AI stack assumes the human element is either a cost to be eliminated or a risk to be managed, never a constituency with leverage. Samsung's workers have leverage because chips are physical. The Times's freelancers have leverage because bylines still carry trust. Even the white-collar professionals Suleyman expects to automate have leverage: they're the buyers and users of the products Microsoft sells.

The question for anyone building in this space: what happens when the humans in your value chain start negotiating like they know what they're worth?

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