“There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?” English essayist Charles Lamb posed this seminal question in a letter in 1830. This Labor Day, I am reminded of the potential costs as well as benefits to innovations — some so dire that they should be paused if not stopped entirely. Think nuclear weapons. Or take the cloning of humans — a bridge too far made most publicly visible in 2018 when Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui employed CRISP-Cas9 technology to edit the genes of more than a half-dozen human embryos, resulting in the birth of twins ostensibly resistant to HIV. For his hubris, He served three years in prison. Whether such work goes on in secret is unknown. Meanwhile, court battles are being fought over how much of research in artificial intelligence should be public. Even as consumers inspect packaged foods for labeling of genetically modified products, while bombs fall intermittently in Iran to slow any development of nuclear capability by this sponsor of terrorism, Labor Day should cause us to consider the transformation of the workplace by AI, especially its potential impact on entry-level jobs, not to mention white-collar work. Were Lamb alive today, he might consider this manmade ghost in the machine to be leading the pack as it marches at double-time. We can try to compartmentalize nuclear warfare capability and ban dangerous human gene research, but AI technology won’t stay bottled in the lab. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei put the economic and societal impacts of AI squarely on the radar in 2025: “AI could eliminate up to half of all entry-level jobs in the next five years.” He went on to predict up to 20 percent unemployment. Given his dire prognostication, Amodei has advocated for something espoused by some economists as