The problem with AI is about power, not technology – Jacobin

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, in other words, is not a revolutionary technology, but rather a story about technology. Over the course of the past century, unions have struggled to counter employers’ use of the ideological power of technological utopianism, or the idea that technology itself will produce an ideal, frictionless society. (Just one telling example of this is the name General Motors gave its pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair: Futurama.) AI is yet another chapter in this story of technological utopianism to degrade labor by rhetorically obscuring it. If labor unions understand changes to the means of production outside the terms of technological progress, it will become easier for unions to negotiate terms here and now, rather than debate what effect they might have in a vague, all too speculative future.