“he”/“him” A Canadian Prairie Mennonite from the '70s & '80s, a Preacher’s Kid, slowly recovering from a hemorrhagic stroke. I am not — yet — in a 12-Step Program.
Thursday, July 27, 2023
AI: "But it's so cute!"
Much ado is made of Artificial Intelligence these days.But the person using Google Auto-Complete, or something like it, is already using AI -- "You're soaking in it!"
In the NWU there’s no doubt about solidarity with the WGA, but on AI and freelance labor, it’s difficult in some ways just figuring out what the relevant questions are. Some FSP working-group members took initiative to do a union-wide survey pretty recently here (results not yet published, I don’t think). A good step.
My clunky response to the end-of-survey feelings-&-overall-reactions question:
‘I would like to see a significant effort to repudiate the mis-framing of these tech developments as “artificial intelligence,” first, so that corporate interest in promoting their ubiquity and (apparent) inevitability and the choices to be weighed by labor (in all categories, not media workers only), both, can be grasped more clearly. It’s very hard to generalize evaluatively about the many present and future industrial and consumer applications of what is not machine intelligence at all but an intensification of the large-scale data-handling we already live with, adapted to performance of some new crowd-pleasing tricks. It’s comparatively straightforward, on the other hand, to show what kind of outsized power advantage over worker, consumer, and citizen, in market and civil spheres alike, is being sought now by businesses operating in a number of mass-market sectors. Labor needs to be given the chance to appreciate how the battle lines between it and capital are being redrawn — or where they’re being redrawn, to put it differently: not at the workstation where forms of “generative” assist might be incorporated into workflows an individual worker conforms to, in other words, but at the desks of management layers increasingly remote from individual worker realities.’
An item from Financial Times editor Rana Foroohar — not exactly a labor activist! — that NWU’s president shared around with some of us by email today actually kind of gets at the same thing. That was interesting to see.
2 comments:
In the NWU there’s no doubt about solidarity with the WGA, but on AI and freelance labor, it’s difficult in some ways just figuring out what the relevant questions are. Some FSP working-group members took initiative to do a union-wide survey pretty recently here (results not yet published, I don’t think). A good step.
My clunky response to the end-of-survey feelings-&-overall-reactions question:
‘I would like to see a significant effort to repudiate the mis-framing of these tech developments as “artificial intelligence,” first, so that corporate interest in promoting their ubiquity and (apparent) inevitability and the choices to be weighed by labor (in all categories, not media workers only), both, can be grasped more clearly. It’s very hard to generalize evaluatively about the many present and future industrial and consumer applications of what is not machine intelligence at all but an intensification of the large-scale data-handling we already live with, adapted to performance of some new crowd-pleasing tricks. It’s comparatively straightforward, on the other hand, to show what kind of outsized power advantage over worker, consumer, and citizen, in market and civil spheres alike, is being sought now by businesses operating in a number of mass-market sectors. Labor needs to be given the chance to appreciate how the battle lines between it and capital are being redrawn — or where they’re being redrawn, to put it differently: not at the workstation where forms of “generative” assist might be incorporated into workflows an individual worker conforms to, in other words, but at the desks of management layers increasingly remote from individual worker realities.’
An item from Financial Times editor Rana Foroohar — not exactly a labor activist! — that NWU’s president shared around with some of us by email today actually kind of gets at the same thing. That was interesting to see.
The Luddites were better equipped for the fight, I suspect. I often think of them -- while I'm soaking!
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