Miller is a local author, professor at San Diego City College, and vice president for the American Federation of Teachers, Local 1931. He lives in Golden Hill.
Are you ready for the great disruption? According to a recent article in The New York Times, tens of millions of jobs could be automated by generative artificial intelligence. Boosters of AI are bullish on how this technology will increase productivity, but the cost for workers could be enormous.
According to The New York Times, “there will be immense instability for displaced workers. Automation has been a significant driver of income inequality in America, according to a study from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University. By their estimates, 50 to 70 percent of changes in the U.S. wage structure since 1980 were due to loss of income among blue-collar and office workers because of automation.”
Defenders of such automation characterize the fears of anxious critics as well as a host of other concerned educators, artists, journalists, knowledge workers and those who labor in the service sector as an anti-tech Luddite response to an innovation that will liberate us from drudgery, create more jobs than it destroys, and usher in a wave of utopian innovation. Their thinking goes that a brave new world of better education, medical care, climate action and unimaginable access to more and superior information will make life easier and work less onerous, and those displaced will surely benefit more than they suffer.
The corporate sector is already signaling that it will be the government’s job to soften the blow, but in an era of intense political polarization and gridlock, that might just be wishful thinking.
As Naomi Klein in The Guardian has pointed out, AI is not being dropped into a neutral environment, but rather into our current system that is “built to maximize the extraction of wealth and profit — from both humans and the natural world — a reality that has brought us to what we might think of as capitalism’s techno-necro stage. In that reality of hyper-concentrated power and wealth, AI — far from living up to all those utopian hallucinations — is much more likely to become a fearsome tool of further dispossession and despoilation.”
Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic sees AI less as a new threat to the world as we know it than as part of a very old story that workers of all kinds have had to deal with since the dawn of the industrial era. According to him, AI is not a visionary tool that will unlock human creativity or a dystopian force that ushers in the apocalypse. Rather it’s just another chapter in the gospel of efficiency that has dominated American business and culture since Taylorism — the scientific management of labor — was birthed on the factory floor.
As Warzel puts it: “We’ve seen this one before. Time and again, a piece of technology promises to increase productivity by chipping away at the inefficiencies in our lives. We’re told that it will liberate us — from the tyranny of our inboxes or from toiling on factory floors — and we will recoup our time, the most precious commodity of all. But that time is usually reinvested into more labor. The logic is simple and circular: Increased efficiency frees us up to be more productive. Frederick Winslow Taylor and his stopwatch ruthlessly optimized the factory floor at Bethlehem Steel by surveilling workers and forcing them to eliminate breaks and streamline their motions. The principles of Taylorism changed business and management forever. But its gains weren’t to the benefit of the worker, who was simply driven to produce more each shift.”
In the realm of education, many of my colleagues have profound concerns. What does the ability to turn in AI-generated writing and other forms of academic work do to learning? What kinds of knowledge are we ready to turn over to AI to generate for us? Why would we do this? Why not? We don’t have answers to these questions, but the technology is already here and in use and has resulted in fears about a new tidal wave of cheating across many disciplines in higher education, for instance.
What will AI do to teachers and other knowledge workers in of employment in the future? Some folks are already preparing to throw most educators into the dustbin of history. Luis von Ahn, founder of Duolingo, told The New Yorker that, “Artificial intelligence would eventually make computers better teachers than people.” Unlike previous technological disruptions that eliminated solid working-class jobs, the coming AI transformation is a threat to scores of middle-class professions. There is also a potential impact on service sector work down the socioeconomic ladder and for future massive unemployment for the losers in the AI derby.
Of course, there are possible solutions to all this disruption, like a guaranteed annual income, a radically shorter work week and promises of new tech-assisted rather than tech-eliminated employment. But, as Naomi Klein reminded us above, when one releases such a transformative technology into a world of vast and entrenched economic inequality, it would be naive to think that such visionary, humane responses would prevail rather than the meaner future of increased precarity and scarcity where the lords of the new economy win big while others pay the costs.
