The Problem With AI Is About Power, Not Technology
Artificial intelligence has the potential to seriously harm workers — not because of something inherent to the technology, but because bosses are in control of it.
While technologies like ChatGPT might seem poised to replace white-collar workers, employers are more likely to use machine learning to break up and deskill jobs. (Olivier Morin / AFP via Getty Images)
The material changes ushered in under the aegis of artificial intelligence (AI) are not leading to the abolition of human labor but rather its degradation. This is typical of the history of mechanization since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Instead of relieving people of work, employers have deployed technology — even the mere idea of technology — to turn relatively good jobs into bad jobs by breaking up craft work into semiskilled labor and by obscuring the labor of human beings behind a technological apparatus so that it can be had more cheaply.
Employers invoke the term AI to tell a story in which technological progress, union busting, and labor degradation are synonymous. However, this degradation is not a quality of the technology itself but rather of the relationship between capital and labor. The current discussion around AI and the future of work is the latest development in a longer history of employers seeking to undermine worker power by claiming that human labor is losing its value and that technological progress, rather than human agents, is responsible.
AI Is Not a Specific Technology
When tech entrepreneurs speak of AI doing this or AI doing that — like when Elon Musk promised former British prime minister Rishi Sunak a coming age of abundance in which no one will need to work because “AI will be able to do it all” — they are using the term AI in a way that occludes more than it clarifies. Academic researchers in the field of AI, for example, do not generally use the term AI to describe a specific technology. It is, quite simply, the practice of making “computers do the sorts of things that minds do,” as defined by Margaret A. Boden, an authority in the field. In other words, AI is less a technology and more a desire to build a machine that acts as though it is intelligent. There is no single technology that makes AI distinctive from computer science.
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