GoKawiilThere are about a thousand and one debates about the ecology of AI, the ethics of AI, the governance of AI. As the technology advances, the debate with the slipperiest footing is on the actual efficacy of AI: does this work for this application? Or for this one? Ultimately, whether LLMs “work” as a technology or not doesn’t matter. The function of a system is its output, and no matter what utility individuals find in the tech, the widespread adoption and deployment should be considered and regarded firstly as a threat to the labor force.
To illustrate, we’ll consider a few scenarios.
This is a short preface to a larger piece I’m working on called The Threat, which covers AI mandates at work, harm reduction in the use of LLMs, and long-term strategies as industries expand their adoption of this technology.
AI works
O, great miracle — the tech advances! It will soon be as good or better per dollar than its human equivalent. Under the current economic system, there exists no incentive for corporations to keep those human equivalents employed. Humans necessitate sticky conversations about benefits, work hours, protections, and accountability that AI frankly does not. What happens to those jobs?
AI proponents often compare the advent of the tech to the Industrial Revolution — many jobs were lost as industries were completely refactored and destroyed by these technologies, like we expect AI to, they say, but as you can clearly see, humans are still here, working now in different or differently-shaped industries. Those jobs are considered unfortunate collateral in a necessary technological reshuffling of the labor market.
But the buried lede of the Industrial Revolution comparison is that the revolution didn’t simply exchange some jobs for others. It developed a new capitalist system of labor de-skilling. De-skilling extracts the knowledge of design, craft, and mastery from high-skill workers and replaces those craftsperson type roles with new types of less-skilled and more-specialized roles. Those increasingly specific roles, in increasingly complex systems, meant that the average level of wide conceptual understanding of each worker was reduced, resulting in concentrated power of the managerial class.
As the average skill level of a worker goes down, the easier it becomes for capitalists to control a labor force. If a worker can be easily replaced, there is no justification to pay that worker high wages, or ultimately to keep that worker employed.
In this future where LLMs really are the be-all end-all many techno-optimists purport them to be, they will expand to wider and wider industries. Benefitting from narrowed and more specific job requirements, they will capture more roles, automate and de-skill more industries, and result in a widespread lowering of wages, job security, and employment.
And while those tech leaders on the optimistic far end of the axis pretend to believe this will open doors for some utopia where mankind does not work, it is plain to see the dishonesty of this when looking at how those tech leaders treat humans of any class lower than theirs, be it in their brutal mass layoffs of white collar workers, or the criminalization of homeless folks.
... continue reading