The Foundation Before the Rights: ICESCR Article 1 and Economic Self-Determination in the Age of AI
ICESCR Article 1 stands as the only provision shared identically between the two great 1966 human rights covenants: all peoples have the right to self-determination, including the right to freely pursue their economic development and to control their own means of subsistence. When AI concentrates economic gains among a narrow class of capital owners while displacing workers at scale, the right to economic self-determination reaches beyond aspiration — it names the structural terrain that AI-driven labor displacement enters, a terrain the United States has chosen to leave unaccountable. The United States has never ratified.