Advocates of big tech and unregulated advancement often like to paint the future as a utopia.

Technology has solved our most pressing problems – climate change, poverty, starvation, disease, the tyranny of distance, and humans are living in peace, having no more to fight about.

In the tales of this utopia, there is an abundance of resources, all thanks to new technology, so how about we just let them get on with it, pesky regulators? How about we just get our politicians on-board so we can let tech do its thing (without having to pay for it) and then we are all just one day closer to living our best lives.

Sounds wonderful, except for this little thing called “reality”.

In reality, these massive disruptions rarely work for the collective – and I am going to hold your hand while I say this – and billionaires are not your friend and cannot be trusted to work for the collective good. In fact, it is a failure of regulation that has created billionaires in the first place. They shouldn’t exist. That they do is proof of market failure.

Yet we continue to hear, including from the Productivity Commission and the government – which focused the recent economic roundtable on finding ways to turbo charge new technologies, by loosening regulations – that we should collectively get out of the way of big tech and the billionaires who control it, to solve our productivity crisis.

Not spoken about, or given little space, is the inevitable result of this lack of regulation and the gung-ho approach of live and let die when it comes to new technologies, such as artificial intelligence.

Political scientist Van Jackson recently alerted his Un-Diplomatic audience to this paper, which provides a list of the jobs Microsoft believes are most replaceable by AI.

This is not to say that every human who holds one of these jobs (like me, sitting at No.16) will find themselves out of work, but there is a very high AI applicability score for the job that I do. This, of course, does not cover the jobs already being taken by AI, including drivers, transport, factory production lines and increasingly, critical thinking.

Having AI models train on the work of the people it is going to replace, something the Productivity Commission recently suggested should be done without having to pay the people whose work it is stealing, seems less than ideal for future “productivity”.

That’s without taking into account the existing issues with AI, which so far has been let loose without regulation onto the world with worrying impacts. It’s sycophantic, telling users what they want to hear, even when it plays into a delusion the user has created, which can have devastating real world impacts.

(There are entire forums dedicated to people who have AI “partners” already, who have mobilised in the real world to stop changes they don’t like to the model their partner was created in.)

You need never reckon with grief, guilt or any other uncomfortable human emotion – not if AI can just create a version of your lost loved ones to converse with, or constantly tell you are right. That is bound to be really healthy for human development.

The concerns around AI and its impact on education have focused on students using it to complete assignments and removing the need for educators. But, as American sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has pointed out, one of the bigger issues is there will be no desire to hire and support the additional educators needed to offset the “teachings” of AI and introduce critical thought.

There is the huge impact to the environment, which no one appears to be taking responsibility for.

But above all, it essentially allows for a few players – and that includes government – to completely own and track your life.

Driverless cars sound great in theory, until you realise that you will never be able to travel anywhere without being tracked. Your car can be disabled with a code. And for those who think they do the right thing so it will never be a problem for them, do you really think that would be enough to protect you?

Why are we rushing headlong into a future that threatens our agency, our livelihoods and our planet? Why wouldn’t you want that to be regulated? Or at least, to have a say over what boundaries should be applied to its applications?

The idea that any sort of government oversight would be a handbrake to progress that impacts our future prosperity assumes good faith every step of the way from those implementing a technology that at its heart is designed to replace, and control, humans. The immediate concern is jobs. But the boundaries we should be concerned with are not just immediate productivity hits, but our future as a whole.

ACTU secretary Sally McManus is one of the lone voices calling for an AI Act, legislation designed to handle artificial intelligence’s integration into Australian workplaces, institutions and society. The best she was able to say at the end of last week’s economic roundtable was that the Tech Council and other advocates of AI were not as hostile to the idea as they were going in and there is potential some people will be paid for AI models being trained on their work.

The Productivity Commission has advised government to retrofit existing legislation around AI rather than create an act, a move that has famously worked in the past to deal in dealing with new technologies (sarcasm).

Just ask anyone who has been harassed and abused on social media how well our communications act amendments have worked to bring about, first, an end to the abuse and, second, justice.

Our politicians are of the view that we need to embrace these new technologies without that pesky abundance-handbrake of regulation.

But the thing with all these utopias that tech and abundance bros keep promising is that they rarely create a utopia for those being asked to give something up. That’s where the political focus should be centred. Now, and the future.

Amy Remeikis is a contributing editor for The New Daily and chief political analyst for The Australia Institute