Megan Amram on tech disruption, labour solidarity, and the specific Portland irony of rooting for the coders
By Megan Amram for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Portland, Thursday. Still raining. AI update: complicated.
I went to a meeting this week about AI and labour. It was attended by people with strong opinions and reusable coffee cups. The consensus: AI replacing workers is bad. The complication: AI is now replacing programmers, and programmers are, as a demographic, not historically the most unionised workforce, and some of them spent the last decade making the very tools now eating their jobs, which is either poetic justice or a tragedy depending on how much sympathy you have stored up and whether you have used it all on the warehouse workers already.
I have complicated feelings. I am a writer. I have been told repeatedly that AI will replace writers. I am currently writing this while alive and employed, but I concede the jury is technically still deliberating. I am rooting for the programmers in the way you root for a sports team you have only recently discovered: with genuine enthusiasm and very limited contextual knowledge.
The Left Wing Reading
The Marxist reading is clean: capital has found a new way to eliminate labour costs, and the workers being eliminated this time happen to have been, themselves, instruments of that capital. This is called the dialectic. It is uncomfortable. It does not care whether you had good intentions when you built the language model.
According to The Guardian’s AI coverage, tech companies are framing this as “productivity enhancement.” My mum in Crouch End would call it something shorter. She would be correct.
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