The landlord is now a tech billionaire. Instead of bags of gold, he distributes access to artificial intelligence: funds, powerful computers, sophisticated algorithms, enormous databases, sources of fuel and water, and generative AI tools.
The first employee uses AI to develop businesses, automate production, and multiply the billionaire's wealth. The second uses AI to create new products and expand the company's market. Both are praised to high heavens for their productivity. The third employee, however, is different.
He had been a contractual worker, driving a jeepney during the day and encoding data at night. His experience was not an illustration for somebody else’s theory. It was knowledge: of work, exhaustion, dependence, and the distance between the people who create wealth and those who control it.
He knew what AI could do and the benefits it offered. But he also knew that the technology was built using enormous amounts of human labor, natural resources, cultural knowledge, and information collected from people like him.
When the billionaire demanded an accounting, the third employee spoke.
"Sir, I did not multiply your talents. But I have a question. Who supplies the data that trains your AI? Who labels the images, checks the information, writes the books, creates the music, and produces the cultural knowledge that make your machines intelligent? Where is the fuel and water powering your computers sourced from? Why do you receive the profits while the people whose labor made this technology possible remain poor?"
The billionaire dismissed the question. In his accounting, only the increase in his wealth counted. Instead, he ordered the employee fired.
But outside the tech billionaire's office, something remarkable was happening. Jeepney drivers, teachers, farmers, students, pastors, and laborers were gathering. They were learning to use AI to translate information, support education, and document their histories. But they were also asking who should decide its uses, how their work would be recognized, and how to challenge answers that misrepresent their lives.
They were no longer content to be raw materials for somebody else’s knowledge and wealth. They wanted to become participants in deciding what the technology was for. They wanted not merely access, but agency.
And someone at the back, a young student, asked: “Perhaps the question is not only how many talents have we multiplied? Whose labor made that multiplication possible? Whose wealth increased? Who was cast outside? And what might we create together if those outside were allowed to set the questions?”
Our collective task is not to ask AI to speak for those of us who ride jeepneys. It is to make sure that the people inside can question it, contest it, and redirect it. We do not need technology that speaks in place of the poor. We need technology whose purposes the poor can help shape and determine and utilize to address exploitation and extraction.
This is the work of beating swords into plowshares. This is the work of transforming US military jeeps into Filipino mass transport jeepneys. This is the work of repurposing AI. This is what our shared journey requires.
*Presented during the South Central Luzon Clergy Convocation of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente, 11 November 2026, held at the Bukas Loob sa Dios Covenant House and Retreat Center, Dasmarinas, Cavite.
+The NIV's translation, bags of gold, is closer to the Greek.
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