A.I. and Creative Labor

foreign right okay thank you a good place to be it's my place to be you know I'm here in Florida yes yes I mean I think we're just getting over the jet lag now Nick is right there too so excited to chat to you after uh and I hope you're having an exciting time at conference my name is brechner I am from London and I work for Haymarket in the UK um before we begin I'd like to read out a few Community safety announcements so this is just a reminder that all socialism conference attendees are required to wear masks fully covering the nose and mouth while indoors in conference spaces including hallways and meeting rooms speakers from the front of sessions May remove their masks to deliver their presentations but only while speaking and audience members are still required to wear masks even while asking questions or making comments the math policy is in place to protect all of us especially the immunocompromised from the risk of Contracting covet 19. the conference Community safety plan relies in part on badge Checkers at the door of each room and all attendees are expected to wear their conference badges at all times to enter conference meeting rooms please respect the bagged Checkers and know that they're here to support a safe conference you can see registration if you have any issues at all so thank you everyone for listening and for following those guidelines it is now my absolute pleasure to introduce Ben Davis who will be speaking to us today about the expansion of artificial intelligence and its implications for the future of Labor culture and the economy Ben Davis is the author of Art in the after culture and 9.5 Theses on Art and class which art news named one of the best art books of the decade in 2019 you can find both books at the bookstore after the talk just across the corridor Ben has also been artnet news's National Art critics since 2016. so we'll hear Ben speak for about 30 minutes and then we'll have time for discussion afterward Ben over to you thank you [Applause] now the mask comes off um so can you hear me okay this is the right the right way to talk here um so I'm on the email list of this AI writing startup it's called Jasper AI it's one of these um new companies that are pitching themselves as automating what I do out of existence writing out of existence and as you'd expect this company sends out a huge amount of email to try and get your attention but a few months ago Darby Rollins the CEO of Jasper sent out a very special email blast and I want to begin this talk about Ai and creative labor by reading you a part of it you've seen the news on AI the AI Revolution is upon us in millions nay billions of humans will be forced into adoption of this exciting terrifying spectacular technology and through this forced adoption we'll either struggle to survive or evolve and hopefully Thrive will you be one of the lucky ones as the gap between technology widens have you considered if you have the wherewithal to jog Spring Run the long distance race to keep and stay ahead of this fast-paced quickly evolving technology and not be left in the dust Millions won't and the sad truth is is the gap widens and AI continues evolving faster than some can keep up stagnation will occur in a not so bright side of this boom of innovation will be too much to keep up with the result isn't pretty death addiction desperation and survive he actually says addiction desperation survive I don't know what that what that means and then he ends which side of this gap between humanity and Technology will you land will you stand adapt improve what do you think will you run or will you fall behind consider the thought you put into answering those questions the choice is yours at least for now so that is quite the product pitch um and it's not even my favorite part of this particular email my favorite part is that Rollins has a post script to this where he writes Believe It or Not Jasper had no part to play in writing that that was from the heart so here we are just a couple of months into the AI um the creative AI boom and the CEO of this AI company is already begging you desperately not to tune out and pay attention because he's human and this message is not just like all the other Robo spam email blasts that his company is actually designed to to enable and I think that this particular manic bombastic chaotic tone really represents the mainstream tenor of the AI conversation right now if you've had the news on um before last year I kind of thought that we had enough to deal with in our hands with like climate change and also I thought that climate change was like the most naturally radicalizing cause because it really does force the issue of system change and if there's one simple message that I I think I want to hit home in this talk is that I think that the struggles over how AI gets deployed are as potentially radicalizing as that already at this early date AI is a factor in two major and very high visibility labor actions The Screen Actors Guild and Writer's Guild of America strikes if you're a teacher and many socialists are you've probably had crisis meetings about AI writing respectable people are putting out open letters warning that there should be a moratorium on deploying new kinds of AI to prevent Armageddon and then putting out new kinds of AI and themselves you have predictions of massive job losses and borderline Messianic Promises of economic growth you have calls for Universal basic income getting much more visible so I really think this is a very important moment to intervene into as leftists and people who think about the future and present of work now ai is or artificial intelligence is a big term and in this talk I'm going to focus specifically on what's called generative AI and its impact on right Industries like writing design and so on um now just before we start just out of curiosity how many people know what I'm talking about with generative AI like the majority of people yeah this is like mainstream news you probably already have opinions on how many people know how it works if you're hoping you know how it works your data lock because I am a writer not a technologist I'm not going to be able to explain it to you um and that's not going to be the focus of this talk but basically we're talking about these applications that slurp up enormous amounts of content in terms of text and images and allow you to spit back out very sophisticated texts human-like texts or conversations or imagery with just a few commands using natural language so generative AI is going to be my very narrow focus and even within this deliberately narrow Focus there are questions of literal life and death about how this technology is going to play out that I'm not going to have time to talk about we can talk about them in the in the in the comments if you like I'm not going to talk about AI bias about surveillance about privacy about misinformation about intellectual property about the psychological consequences of replacing human interactions with human-like machine interactions we don't have time to talk about the massive environmental impact of ubiquitous AI though you should definitely go read this Bloomberg businessweek piece from black Bloomberg Business Week piece from July called thirsty data centers are making hot summers even scarier which talks about the increasing water use demands generated by Ai and how that is igniting struggle in Rural America I'm not a technologist I'm a writer so I'm really going to focus on the ideology around this subject not the technical parts of it I'm sure people will have technical things to say in the discussion but if we only focus on just the question of how generative AI plays out in the workplace we already have an astonishing number of issues that are Central to Marxist theory in fact there's this famous text by Marx called the fragment on machines where which some people say in which some people say he predicts something like AI is the consequence of his economic theory Marx writes once adopted into the production process of capital the means of Labor passed through different Metamorphoses whose culmination is the machine or rather an automatic system of Machinery set in motion by an automaton a moving power that moves itself this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical intellectual organs so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages now there's no shortage of alarm on the left about AI but I think that one of the reasons that some people might be hesitant to emphasize the dramatic impact of these Technologies is a very legitimate skepticism about falling for Tech hype after all we are coming off of the total Duds of the cryptocurrency and metaverse boom and if you read the mainstream financial and Tech press with any kind of regularity there's a palpable desperation for a next new big thing to part where to park your Investments and the idea that AI is this apocalyptic Unstoppable force can be basically an advertising pitch for it as you can see in that unhinged Jasper AI email so it's tempting to focus on how dumb and uncreative this creative technology is to say things like that's just glorified autocomplete that it's just randomly simulating the signs of intelligence with no underlying coherence or context which is true we're going to point out all the goonie mistakes that AI makes and and I do want you to know uh of course I did the corny thing for this talk and ask chat GPT to write me an essay that Marxism and Ai and it told me that um Lenin believed that the state as the representative of the working class could use AI to advance socialism so it's good to know but so but but so um yeah attempting to focus on the um what it can't do but at the same time the idea that AI is just a tool and statements of the kind that it will never replace human creativity are also part of the sales pitch to try and soft pedal the implications of this very potentially disruptive technology arvind Krishna who's the CEO of IBM recently said on cnbc's Squawk Box it's absolutely not displacing it's augmenting workers but in the same time Krishna said that he was pausing hiring for jobs that could be replaced by AI That's about 7 7 800 human White Collar jobs saying that with AI you can get the same work done with fewer people that's just the nature of productivity so a key term here is going to be automation AI is being sold as a way to automate forms of intellectual work office work creative work and so on so my first point for us is that um it is going to help to know as these debates unfold around us to know something about the history of Automation and if you study that history it has always had this kind of double character that I just talked about that's going to change everything but it's not going to change anything really I really recommend this book for people who are interested Jason reznikov's Labor's end how the promise of Auto great automation degraded work reznikov in this book makes a few points that I think are useful to have on hand if you're debating someone about this one is that the idea of automation comes from the late 1940s that's when the term is born and it starts at the Ford Motor Company in the Golden Age of post-war U.S capital and it was always he argues as much political as it was technological reznikov writes saddled with unions they could limit but not destroy trapped by a narrative that banned explicit hostility to the principle of unions and collective bargaining business interests needed to find another way to escape the bargaining table the answer came in the form of the widespread technological determinism that obscured the desire for profit and power behind the language of social utopianism reznikov emphasizes that the automation discourse that means the the ideas around AI the ideas about AI not necessarily the Techno the ideas about Automation and machines not necessarily the things themselves was both essentially a way to get around class struggle in this era and a disguised version of the war on workers basically the idea of the post-war social contract was that if new more productive Machinery could be installed if the union would consent to that then High wages could be justified blue-collar workers could benefit by graduated from doing great graduating from doing greedy manual labor to being managers of machines many labor historians view the idea of accepting automation as coming from what they consider to be the really real great mistake of U.S labor the acceptance of contracts that traded the ideal of shop floor democracy and control over the workplace that had been fought for and won during the 1930s for a bigger piece of the pie of and uh and stability but the most important thing that resnikov shows in his study is that this sci-fi image of the workerless factory where machines did all the work that this idea functioned as much as a threat to workers as a reality in practice new machines did mean some workers lost their jobs but it didn't always mean that overall Factory that the overall Factory Workforce went down certainly not immediately often it meant more workers just doing different kinds of tasks well automation was sold as labor saving and taking away unpleasant alienating tasks the Paradox was that often the actual intensity of work went up for workers automation was often for workers is the name for speed up you know that was synonymous for them with speed up not with not with you know uh extra free time and that's because the whole point was not to increase worker free time but to increase output whatever work remained had to accelerate to match the machine's efficiency to get higher numbers of units out andresnakov has this great quote from a worker that sums it all up all automation is meant to us as unemployment and overwork both at the same time in any case automation was always a name for breaking up and reorganizing labor labor as much as replacing it not just about producing more and better products but about producing cheaper and more divided workers and as a consequence we can say that both the Sci-Fi you know we don't need workers perspective and the benign automation just augments what you do perspective hide the blunt reality of capitalism Capital sees new technology first of all as an opportunity to renegotiate and revalue labor on its terms incidentally uh here's a fun detail the big emblematic company of this era of automation was um of course it's already been mentioned IBM International Business Machines and many people will know that the evil the about the that the evil AI in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 Opus 2001 A Space Odyssey is called HAL 9000 well the name Hal is a joke about IBM if you take each letter of IBM and you push it Forward one letter you get Hao so even though automation evokes ideals of getting rid of manual labor in factory work for us today the sense that of the alienation of intellectual labor by machines was already active in this moment in a way that we can recognize in our in our new fears today this brings me to the second reason why I think that the AI discourse might be today might be very radicalizing so the title of my talk contains the term creative labor and clearly Ai and automation of various kinds affect large categories of employment not just white-collar intellectual or quote-unquote creative work in some ways driverless cars are a far more disruptive technology than dolly or chat GPT or any of these generative AI applications vehicle driver is the single biggest employment category for male workers in the United States but nevertheless what I want to emphasize here is that I think there is a certain element of the AI discussion that is particularly socially disruptive and radicalizing because it affects the entire promise that underlies our particular moment of capitalism I mean think about it like learn to code has been the pat answer for anyone worried about the decline of old forms of industrial employment for a generation or more it was patronizing it was not a good answer to the problems of the industrialization and unemployment but it was an answer there needs to be a positive vision for where an ordinary person might look to within contemporary capitalism for a model of social advancement well among other things generative AI is being directly sold as a way to de-skill coding and let big Tech finally get its labor costs Down the Wall Street Journal rights artificial intelligence software is eating the software industry as companies turn degenerative AI tools to save money on programmers and it speaks of a Lost Generation of early career Developers and I think we shouldn't underestimate the importance of this ideological effect of the AI conversation as it plays out around us Stuart Hall the great the great Marxist thinker Stuart Hall and and some co-thinkers talked about how in the 1950s and 1960s there was this idea of the affluent society and how it served as a kind of social myth their idea was that there was there's plenty of inequality in that era and lots of Injustice but there basically was a ruling class ideology that Society offered you affluence not everyone had it but it was a promise that you could get it in the 1960s that promise broke down in 1970s that promise broke down when the the period of stability and relative prosperity of the previous period ended um and there was something you know of an ideological crisis eventually we ended up with a form of capitalism we live in now neoliberalism is what you know the term of Art and a lot of neoliberalism's ideology is negative about trying to make workers accept a worse bargain so that business and investors can have more but I think you can say that there's a positive component of neoliberalism like something it's offering as a vision instead of the affluent society it offered the creative economy that is you may have less stable employment we may not have good paying union jobs all that's going to be automated or go overseas and the ideology at least but guess what you're going to have uh more vibrant jobs more interesting creative jobs and interesting Fields like design entertainment technology and so on this is an old social uh compact in U.S

life so it has some persuasiveness to something maturing Baby Boomers could pass on to their children there's a there's a there's a famous quote by John Adams the second president who wrote to his wife um I must study politics and war that my sons may have Liberty to study mathematics and philosophy my sons out to study mathematics and philosophy geography Natural History Naval architecture navigation Commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting poetry music architecture statuary tapestry and porcelain one generation suffers alienation so that the next might do more fulfilling more creative things and again just as with the affluent society idea not everyone actually was affluent but it was a promise in the creative economy it's not that everyone actually gets to be creative it functions as a promise even if there were more losers than winners it's an image of what it could mean to be a winner in any case when you introduce these AI processes whose main effect is to de-skill and alienate creative work in this context I do think that has a particularly radicalizing effect the leveling up from Blue Collar to White Collar work from manual to intellectual labor and creative labor Justified an entire Epoch of capitalism it's not clear right now what you are leveling up towards in the AI Society and even pro-i pundits admit this openly not even the people putting out this technology can give you a concrete a straight answer about how this works out well for a large numbers of people to guarantee so large enough numbers of people to guarantee social stability which is why even someone like Sam Altman who's the head of open AI is saying that we're probably going to need a universal basic income not because it's a socialist but because he literally has no vision besides that offer about how this works out and that brings me now to the third reason that I think that the rush into AI in the workplace marks a very significant moment for the left and that is that uh I think it's important to understand that this wave of technology is being pushed with such virulence and and force because of a real underlying problem for capitalism at this time and that means that the the the conflicts over this um over this technology grow out of a sharpening contradiction between the interests of workers and bosses if you read enough New York Times or Harvard Business Review op-eds I mean like I do um every morning when I wake up uh by mainstream pundits writing about AI what you will find is them saying over and over again is a lot of things about how workers need to understand that we've got to embrace technology because increasing productivity is the key for success for our economy our ins in scare quotes capitalism recent recently of late capitalism really has seen a stagnation that alarms those at the top Stephen Ratner who is the former economic advisor to the Obama White House wrote In The New York Times in the Heyday of commercial Innovation between 1920 and 1970 productivity Rose at a 2.8 percent annual rate since then the annual rate of growth has averaged a modest 1.6 percent to pessimists this reflects their view that the most impactful technological advances are behind us to me that means Full Speed Ahead on AI indeed there is an even bigger crisis narrative that is brewing in the background uh arvind Krishna the head of uh IBM who I already referenced he's saying that AI is a response to the client in the working age population he says you need to get productivity otherwise quality of life is going to fall and AI I think is the only answer we got it's not that AI might work out might work to make our lives better it's that it has to work to keep our lives from getting worse that's the argument within the terms of of this particular logic about how capitalism works within all this punditry about AI find again and again this econ 101 argument that workers shouldn't be so scared say it with me now job Destruction has always been offset by job creation basically don't worry about losing your old job new good job will appear you'll hear the same examples over and over again like how ATMs didn't destroy the need for bank tellers Bankers just for freed up to do more high-touch client work or that we don't have Milkman anymore because of refrigeration but you do have more refrigerator repair technicians um I mean you'll literally hear those same examples over and over again it's like the reading from the same script um but I have read the White House EU Joint Task Force report on IAI and jobs and it says very clearly between 1940 and 1980 most new work that employed non-college workers found was in Middle skilled occupations after 1980 however the locus of new work creation for non-college workers shifted away from these middle tier occupations and towards traditionally lower paid personal services there seems to be an utter inability to truly reckon amongst capitalist pundits with the fact that the we need productivity argument cannot be persuasive in the context where productivity gains for 40 years or more have not really been shared with workers but have been slurped up by business investors and the rich that makes the introduction of this new technology very politically combustible I want to return um yeah to return to that quote from the worker that Jason reznkoff cited in Labor's end all automation has meant to us is unemployment overworked both at the same time I just think that's such a good quote um so increasing a productivity is the justification for generative AI uh classically productivity is defined as the increase of units of output per units of input that means that AI also tends to embody the logic of capitalism as moving towards competition through race to the bottom overproduction that degrades the very value of work that makes jobs livable for most people viscerally AI will manifest as the very embodiment of the problem with contemporary work not the solution to the problem of contemporary work that Jasper AI company which I mentioned at the beginning I came into contact with it via a workshop I I snuck into out of morbid curiosity it was called AI writing at scale the whole premise was how you as a manager can up your Revenue goals by out publishing everyone else AI can help if you make X dollars sending out 10 marketing newsletters a day surely you'll make 10x dollars if you have a technology where you can publish 100 marketing newsletters a day surely that won't degrade the overall environment at all one reason I uh uh speaking personally uh now um is that one reason I cannot take seriously the statements the kind that like you know AI don't worry AI is not really uh creative it just does what you say um you will need real creatives to make it really interesting is that it's like anyone who who you know any any thinking person you could see that capitalism doesn't care about what's really socially or creatively valuable if the entire thing motivating its introduction is productivity increase on the boss's term any freed up time doesn't go to creativity doesn't go to improving the quality of the work or your work life it will tend to go to just putting out more units with the lowest investment of Labor in my world everything that they say might happen with AI writing has already happened so I feel like I can predict how this is going to play out to take the example of my own work life writing in the inner age um has already been dramatically devalued it's been accelerated de-skilled as a craft writers don't usually have subject expertise now they write from Wikipedia uh they are already dependent on and right to algorithms specifically whatever the big platforms that control distribution tell you people are reading at a given moment we already treat online writers like robots as appendages of the automaton as Marx might say these conditions have really ravaged the profession causing unionizations at places like Vice Refinery 29 BuzzFeed and so on who produced to this internet model when I started writing uh for a website in the 2000s I had to publish maybe one or two things a month now a new writer for an online publication might publish one or two items of content a day up to five or ten uh now I see that they're advertising for an AI editor for AI editor positions at Publications that expect output of 200 to 250 articles per week this condition of overproduction is also a factor in the current writers strike as you as you probably know limiting AI writing is one issue and it gets a lot of headlines because if it's spooky science fiction dimension but it comes out of the larger issue of streaming residuals and essentially uh streaming it comes down to streaming is not a very profitable business model it gave Netflix a momentary Edge in the early 2010s and made it one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world and a giant of the NASDAQ Stock Exchange sucking in huge amounts of investment but as media giant other giant media companies poured into producing streaming content it became clear that creating massive amounts of programming that isn't valued individually is not actually very profitable compared to old-fashioned cable subscription fees or the terrestrial ad terrestrial ad supported model of content that it was replacing there's way more content they consume it's a hyper competitive environment and this Rush towards scale means that all labor attached to this kind of work has been devalued quality sufferers is the culture industry speeds up this causes consumers to be less loyal to any one thing this in turn puts more pressure on the companies to produce more to get their attention back and as a result of all this the astounding idea of using AI to devalue script writing appears on the scene as a solution to a problem already caused by devaluing their creative work in what seems like a classic example of a downward spiral now this is a young debate but opinion on AI is Shifting very fast notably fast in 2022 pu research says that about 38 percent of people were alarmed by AI this year in a survey that just came out more than half the people 52 percent are alarmed by where AI is taking us nevertheless even as I think that AI is a very potentially radicalizing subject um I do think that a fatalist resigned idea of technology is something that we still have to combat there's a famous book called the dialectic of Enlightenment by the theorist Marxist theorist Max horkheimer and Theodore adorno they write what is not mentioned is that the basis on which technology is gaining power over Society is the power of those whose economic position in society is strongest technical irrationality today is the logic of domination it is a compulsive character of a society alienated from itself the idea that I think people imbibe is that whether it's good or bad technology basically goes one way and um it's kind of a thing that happens to us like the weather Beyond human control um but that idea is not actually accurate to technological history and it's actually dangerous Technologies get introduced all the time that need regulation or approved to socially costly and people have to to organize against there's just a single guy this early 20th century chemist Thomas Midgley Jr he created no less than two separate inventions that were widely adopted considered huge productivity breakthroughs and had catastrophic social consequences that had ultimately to be rolled back at Great cost these were leaded gasoline which made a mass auto market possible in the early 20th century but had disastrous long-term Health consequences for many many communities and chlorofluorocarbons which made Refrigeration much safer But ultimately almost burned a hole in the atmosphere before emergency Global legislation outlawed them piece that I mentioned already Steven Ratner the former Obama hack said basically kind of admonishes people to think of technological change as a historical constant and it just happens throughout history throughout economic history so alarm about it in the short term is ultimately misplaced he says we've had forms of artificial intelligence broadly defined for millennia the Abacus thought to have been invented in Babylonia more than 4 000 years ago replaced more laborious methods of mathematical calculation saving time and therefore reducing work meanwhile over in the financial times The Economist Darren asimolu was quoted recently about this very positive idea of Technology as it applies to the last hundred years of life on Earth basically since capitalism um and I really liked what he had to say he said yes you got progress but you also had costs that were huge and very long lasting a hundred years of much harsher conditions for working people lower real wages much worse health and living conditions less autonomy greater hierarchy and the reason that we came out of it wasn't some law of Economics but rather a Grassroots social struggle in which unions more Progressive politics and ultimately better institutions played a key role and a redirectorate in a redirection of technological change away from Pure automation also contributed importantly at the outset of this talk I mentioned that I think that AI has the potential to be as radicalizing as climate change and I think that there's a connection between the two as well and and when I said earlier that we have to avoid thinking about technology like the weather uh maybe you already thought about the connection you among other things climate change should make us question the inevitable March towards progress Narrative of Technology it should make us question how certain forms of technology technology are of technological life are uh are presented as inevitable over others uh just because they are convenient to make us think how that's a that's a bad way of thinking it should make palpable have this sense of inevitability and helplessness is literally toxic it should make us ask whether a society based on continuous expansion of production for production's sake isn't suicidal the way AI is emerging on the agenda now is almost guaranteed to raise parallel thoughts for huge numbers of people because a technological power this powerful forces the question of who really has power in society thank you foreign [Music] [Applause] thank you Ben for that um wonderful talk and for your incredibly valuable insights into the radicalizing potential of AI um so we now have some time for a discussion um please raise your hand if you have a question or a comment and once I call on you if you're able to please make your way to the mic so that you can share your question I think I'll call on three people at a time just to not crowd the mic area too much and we also have a three minute time limit so we can take as many questions as possible and give other comrades the chance to contribute um so let's take comrade here yep and then here um and just write back at the back glasses comrade with the glasses here hi my name is Griffin until recently I was a grad student so excuse me in recent years in academic circles there's been an interest in the rights of the machine or the life of the machine you can see it in text like Donna haraway's cyborg feminism but also in more mainstream media outputs like ex machina or Battlestar Galactica or even the like sort of hand ringing online where people are like oh my God chatgpt said help me it's alive sort of arguing for expanding the definition of human life to blur with the life of the digital I've kind of always responded to that by pointing to the issue of Labor or luddites of material harm which you've kind of spoken of in your talk and I'm just really curious what you might think of that issue probably better ready hello comrades thank you very much for your uh presentation um I have a question that is maybe putting the cart a little bit before the horse but I think it's appropriate for the Forum I'm talking about General AI um I take some comfort in the idea that um or the uh the notion it's a proverb I'm not exactly sure where it comes from but the idea that you can't get to the Moon by climbing successively taller and taller trees um and I think that for the current version of generative AI it's an apt metaphor because um you know I don't think that these uh that these creations are intelligent or are capable of spontaneously developing into intelligent uh life but I think it raises the question of like what does the Genesis of generative AI or the singularity as it's put in in some of these AI circles um what would that implicate for the future of human labor and of human democracy ultimately um because the way I see it um in terms of General AI if we do create a machine that's a hundred times smarter than a human or a thousand smarter than a human if we're really really lucky we become its pets and we lose control of our society for it forever and there's this benevolent dictatorship um and of course there's a whole gamut of much much worse options um and so I was wondering if you could speak to the uh to the possibility of General Ai and um and what that could obviously it's a huge topic but uh what that could mean for the for the for socialists in the world today thank you thank you yes come right at the back with the glasses and then we'll take another round of questions hey what's happening all uh my name is Joseph Parks and I was a teacher for the last 10 years and I just got uh I quit and I cashed out my retirement and I started uh making a documentary series about what has been going on with technology and education for the last decade yo it is wild also like not the best time in the world to go from like education into filmmaking also very interesting um this is like uh like I was down in LA and like I'm new to the whole thing you know like I'm just a teacher I grew up hella poor and I we've had this system where it is such a this Stark classist uh alignment in schools now and I was not the study teacher and an anti-racist teacher and you know these teachers can't even speak out because they can't go online without fear of harassment and threats and this is a problem I have I have like transgender students and teachers in my documentary they got to try to like keep them safe and stuff um but here's what I want to say and I think people need to be very aware of this about what is going on um I was at a party in Portland Oregon and I met somebody who was just like like Midwestern hipster like you know nice white people and stuff um and they run an edtech company and they just got like a contract to teach math in Chicago and I go down in Chicago I'm sorry in Texas and I was like what do you mean you have a contract for math in Texas and like yeah do you know any Math teachers I was like wait wait what is happening and they said yeah they they're doing a thing called the replacement curriculum that they're getting ready to launch because they don't want to invest and deal with teachers anymore and they don't want to deal with schools anymore and they're going to put all the kids online and when we did that it was a nightmare and a disaster for all of the students and I was there with them every day and they want that to be the new standard and you know we have this saying in education it's a very to the Pacific you know it's plant to seed and it will grow and they're not allowing Educators to plant seeds anymore and they are going to have unqualified people going online and teaching to kids and there's going to be no humanization and is there just this Obsession in America or in capitalism to just reduce everybody to a number to be managed because I'm going to go to Germany and I'm not kidding and I'm gonna do an episode on deoxification because this has to change like it's so bad in education people don't understand um you're going to be at a point where it's gonna be like your parents I swear to God imagine this so you're going to be a parent one day you're going to get anything at home it's like okay well you know you're gonna have U.S history and you're gonna subscribe to it here and it's free but if you want to upgrade to US History without ads it's gonna be like 14.99 a month and that's what they're doing with education right now with privatization um anyway my film project is called class Wars the website is classwars.love

or classwar.love and I know there are people here that could be influential and helpful and um thank you [Applause] because uh obviously it's gonna be a conversation um uh on on the first question uh rates of machines and stuff I mean I think it's kind of a blind alley you know I just think that it's uh I think even Donna haraway herself doesn't really like hold those positions now uh she moved on from the cyborg Manifesto to you know the companion species Manifesto um and um I just it connects to the second question about artificial general intelligence which is like I don't know I don't have a position I mean obviously I think it's I think it's very bad I think that though however I think what I'm trying to do in this talk is the tech these guys that's what they want you to focus on and I don't think it's not like an issue you know what I'm going to focus on the Sci-Fi stuff that what might happen if their technology is just too scary good um what's happening is like the third speaker said has already happened to a certain extent they this the generative AI stuff is an extension of the fact that like a lot of these professions have been de-skilled and routinized already so they are amenable to being treated in this way like that's that what it has already happened that that there's like stuff already going on and they don't really want to talk about that they want to talk about what might happen in the future which could happen the thing I will say about it is is that I think what as you know there is a case that and there's a lot of debate about that fragment that Marx fragment on machines that I read about what he's saying there um because he seems to suggest a certain points in that text that like we'll will develop into something we'll develop Beyond capitalism you know like through technology we it will free us from uh living labor I mean that is part of the Marxist tradition is like a certain interest in technology as making potential a better form of life there's a case for AI um in a better world and what we're gonna have to do have a very dialectical thing of balancing of balancing struggles in here and now with holding on to to the vision that these things matter and could be used better um I think what we have to say about artificial general intelligence is that um uh it these things embody the uh logic of the society that creates them you know the way is AI the final boss of capitalism maybe you know it embodies all its logic centralizes centralized all its power into one algorithm that no one has accessible to that's like a it's like a capitalist dream thing and this book he talks about how like the um the idea of the people who talk people talk about automation the idea that people has of what automation is or can be is always like this self-reflection of of like a manager guy you know who just everybody does exactly what he says without anybody asking questions there's no friction in the system um and so I think that we just need to I mean what I'm trying to say is like we need to focus on these struggles that are happening now and not get too distracted by this but the stakes are high for what happens now because whatever logic we work out through class struggle and negotiate in the present you know these these algorithms are going to embody those struggles you know they're going to be they're they're going to everybody it's gonna be hard-coded into whatever form of higher um technology technological development comes out of it the last thing um is about on teaching I mean it's very I think you're right I mean I think like I said I think that um the one thing I'll say is is I'm not going to do that to everybody's kids they're not gonna do their own kids their own kids are gonna have private tutors and it's gonna be a lot of human labor that goes into it I mean part of the Mania of productivity is like more units processed that's what the the logic that is being applied like how can we process more units of kids of Education of humans um making them you know the classic definition of alienation like the logic flips around like you are the product of the tools that that are supposed to serve you and um I think you know I got married in Vegas this year and uh [Music] [Applause] that's not it's not uh about uh how great that was it's about how weird Vegas is that you're there and and you're um you know I I uh I go to play roulette and I'm thinking you know it's gonna be as glamorous James Bond experience and it's a robot you know the lowest level is that a robot spins the wheel and a robotic voice says plate your bets and you look at a screen it's an upcharge to get human you know and I think that that's pretty much the a vision of the future you know that it's an up charge it's an up charge you get a real to get a real human um on the line thank you Ben um okay we'll take three more questions so comrade right at the back in the black top first um and then comrade right at the end over there um yes you uh and then we'll take person right over here three um hello uh my name is Lily uh I'm in the wga and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the um there was a recent court case in uh DC where they ruled that uh uh art created by AI is in copyrightable and uh I know it's not a great idea to put your faith in the courts but I was wondering if you could talk about the repercussions of that event hey I'm Danny from New York um don't totally have my thoughts together so I'll try to be really quick I'm so happy to be in this discussion um the AI is the final boss of capitalism thing it's really something I mean I hadn't thought about it like that but in terms of the way AI distills so much not even just of autumn is eight autumn automization but the market itself the way you know the way the capitalists talk about the free market this thing as this thing higher than us you know what I mean that that but something that's been created by compiling you know millions of Human Relationships and stealing people's labor and the way that it AI positives is something is you know not Supernatural at all but you know this thing is above us but all the rules within it and I think what the speaker performers are saying that don't get questioned the way that AI has a right to steal all of our everything we produce you know what I mean but the proprietary knowledge of the company is producing AI you know or completely private and yet this is just presented not as another stage of capitalism but it's just wow this new technology that that changes um that changes everything I will just say on on a couple of um so one question you mentioned before the promise of or slight notes of Hope in terms of how quickly people are being alarmed by AI I guess I do have a question about how much of that alarm is an alarm from the same kind of incredible propaganda coming from AI that this is going this is like this thing that's going to take over the world which is sort of it does seem to like when they testify behind to Congress about how like this technology we've created is so powerful we don't even know if we can control it is like an ultimate I don't know it's not a humble brag it's the opposite but it's like you know I mean there's something about it that that's um and I'm not I'm not saying there anyways but so I I do you know want to know if you have thoughts about to what degree people the turn against other people have against AI is rooted in like what it's actually doing versus what you know is sorry they sort of want us to think but I do think also that the the current strikes going on are doing a ton to actually get people focused on the real thing and then the very last thing I'll say is that um I teach writing you know play in college a place yeah that's what I'm doing now uh um something a play one of the many places people are absolutely freaking out of course about chat CPT and stuff and and I think it's very unpredictable what's happening but I guess a flip side to the very real things that the comrade was talking about about the way education is being privatized you know and and de-skilled is that this is also accelerating discussions and education so circles around the kind of writing assignments that have always existed that makes it so easy for AI to copy them do you know what I mean because like if like the whole standardization of Education not just through standardized tests but models of writing that are so already uh AI like do you know what I mean they're like you're supposed to just check these boxes in your writing that is that it's so easy to just plug in please write me an essay on the French Revolution that is suitable for a first-year college class or whatever you know there's obviously a lot more talk about like that having more personal details in your writing and all these things that are kind of questioning Notions of writing that like why did they exist anyways that you should never use I statements and things like that so this is this is a very comparatively minor glimmer but I assume that there's sort of lots of other minor glimmers like that you know what I mean in many other places so that's it thanks so much for this really really vital uh conversation right now um I wonder I know we bracketed off at the beginning a few of the conversations around you know bias and things like that I wonder I have two parts uh first question is you know from Cobalt mining in Africa to lithium Mining and the Andes to the you know conditions of Foxconn workers to you know these different bordered engendered and racialized labor regimes that go into just technology as we conceive of it right now um what more might you say and you know do you have any specific things you find relevant in say the works of timid gabrue the stochastic parrots you know there's conversations about just not only the large language models themselves that are poorly defined um and or the eugenicist ideologies or the test real sort of you know transhumanist effective altruist milieu around this and the billionaires who fund those narratives um and the second point is an invitation to everyone I'm a member of the May 1st movement technology Cooperative it's a non-profit membership-based organization advancing strategic and Collective control of technology for local struggle struggles for Global transformation and emancipation Without Borders and we're going to be facilitating an online conversation it's an open conversation on November 7th I'm talking about the right-wing ideologies and this uh sort of spectacle and myth of artificial intelligence and these promoters framing it and just curious if anyone wants to join in that as well mayfirst.org so great that's that's wonderful to hear from people who actually um have been working this area Okay Lily um uh with you're in luck because I did a podcast about this very case uh this last week um it's a little bit silly um but I have looked into it um really strange a case actually in uh Washington DC by uh computer entrepreneur AI entrepreneur but I ran something called the creativity machine um honestly I worked from 2012 so before any of this but but but a person who actually believes his AI is alive and and honestly a very quirky case in the sense that he was trying to um argue before the courts that his AI is alive and um and therefore it should get the copyright it wasn't about whether AI art can't be copyrightable it was about whether the AI as can be treated as a person with a copyright it's it's it's a little bit quirky um and there's a lot to say about it maybe best afterwards but in terms of fighting things in the courts yeah I think that's really important I mean all these like let's let's got to tackle this from a lot of different directions because it's like uh everything's so organized is to shock and argue with it right and like make things you know move fast and break things uh make make like weave these systems into our life before we can question or challenge what they are and there are all these like questions about the intellectual property um whether any whether whether any of this stuff will be illegal um how you could even um how you can eat you know my My worry is that I I mean I don't know enough technically My worry is that this technology is out there and these models are trained you know that like I'm not exactly sure you could unmake the cake um but I'm interested to know what other people whether other people think I will say that I'm still I think that that you know uh these are battles that'll have to be fought along a lot of different fronts including the court I will say I still have some uh I I still think you know the place where we have all real power is in the workplace so I I'm interested to know from people who are maybe working technology and so on the effect this has on on Consciousness among technological workers I mean I think I think um one of in March's you know over time in Mark's uh uh more and more um value is centralized and fewer fewer number of workers Tech workers have been amongst that privileged group their labor has been very valued has moved a lot of value around the economy so that has been centralized into them that's made it difficult to like organize you know when it's like a particularly privileged sector you know have a ping pong table you know kid massage chairs at work and stuff like that I I do a possible you know interesting hope or development out of this could be like you know a kind of some radicalizing organizing along those lines because I I do think the legal stuff will all be determined with like other struggles that go on you know like how much people seem like this matters how much people care that's that's why I do look to the the the Str the strikes going on right now and actually we should um since we have workers on strike among us as like setting the tone for how the legal battles will play out I mean I think that is incredibly important to Danny's question about um proper like how much of the alarm people are feeling has to do with um propaganda I think definitely some of it but I mean I also do think that there is something I do think there's a reason why people want to talk about um you know AGI and not some of the more mundane stuff but look it is genuinely alarming and radicalizing that Lake capitalists are like hey this thing we've done it could in the world and yet we're still doing it you know that is that is I mean that's the message people are getting about how capitalism works right now and I think that underlines in a similar way the way of climate crisis is like hey we we we've got absolute models that tell us that we've got a limited amount of time to turn this thing around not going to do anything about it but we know it's going to happen you know it's similar to that for me it's like people are like saying uh hey uh yeah we've done something that could essentially uh completely uh uh destroy civilization as we know it um but you know until you you do something that means that I'm not going to be able to that that my competitor is not going to get an edge On Me by not doing it like I'm going ahead I'm full steam ahead for me that is radicalizing I mean I don't think that is there's a certain propaganda element to it um but um the other thing I'd say about that is that actually the people I am thinking about when I think about people who were not political a year ago and are political now because of that that's not their concern they're Tech workers people I know we're in Tech who actually put a well-taced placed in Tech and are looking at and who knows how much is a zip in by being the hype that that's around them but saying you know literally me like you know Ben like you know people who were libertarian Silicon Valley Libertarians a year ago and saying to me um Ben uh everyone's going to lose their job like everyone like like that's what's coming and uh the good thing the possible good the only possible good thing is that you know government may not have to renegotiate the social contract you know because you know and I don't know if that's true I'm not equipped I've read enough to know that no one really knows you know people like there are too many variables and factors at play for anyone really to know but that's like a that's like real people who I wouldn't have expected to be talking about systematic government and intervention in the economy in a very short time ago um okay last question is about um I'm not sure you know it sounds like you're more of an expert in the technical uh debates around this than I am um about extractivism and stuff I mean I do all this stuff uh you look at I just think that people have these two images of dystopia in their minds at once you know like basically like Mad Max in The Matrix and it's like not gonna be both you're not gonna have like Limitless technology that you know is like that goes on forever and you know completely hit the limits of resources like like there there is a you know it's not going to be both um but um in terms of some of the trans humanists the reactionary Silicon Valley ideologies that people are talking about right now that have surfaced I mean and that are informing how these Technologies get implemented and and yeah very clearly reactions to class struggle right I mean that is like that is a ruling class reacting to what we've done that we've done they're like they're like they they thought they were the good guys suddenly they're getting criticized you know um because they moved fast and broke some really consequential things in society and you know they're suddenly like it hurt wounds their self-image and so they're like vulnerable and interested in all this you know neonichian reactionary garbage um that's a justification for you know doing you know uh that like your um your Visionary ideas about how technology the transhumanism are more important than you know uh the lives of and preferences of everybody else on earth like that's a reaction to what's happened it's actually in it's in a sort of a warped way is a

2023-09-12 07:35

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