Resisting AI: Over-Automation Is Not Inevitable
Fighting the politics of inevitability means not assuming that everything happening with technology and commerce is inescapable. Resisting AI: Over-Automation is not inevitable. The main commercial driver behind the uptake of AI is reducing labour costs and getting rid of employees. AI is not automatically a panacea for the world and has to be evaluated by us all, whether it is truly the better option in each instance. Currently, there is this blank acceptance of AI, as this wondrous progress without question. This is a crazy attitude to take when the negative ramifications are predicted at the loss of some 300 million jobs globally.
“Artificial intelligence (AI) could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs, a report by investment bank Goldman Sachs says.”
AI Can Be Resisted By Consumers
Duolingo, the No 1 worldwide language learning app, was going to replace its human staff with AI. It had begun the process.
There has been a lot of push back from the Duolingo community and the replaced workers.
Consumers can make their feelings about such wholesale changes and send a message to the owners and management. The thing to remember is that CEOs and company directors in our current climate are laser focused on shareholder returns. This limited viewpoint permeates the commercial and corporate world. Thus, we, as a global society, are being led into massive wholesale restructuring of the companies which employ our labour on the basis of projected savings on labour costs to these businesses via AI automation.
“AI is coming for your job, your career; and who invented AI? There is a lot of finger pointing at China but the real enemy is often portrayed as a friend. The American betrayal of humanity is gathering pace and nothing much is halting it. The recent revelations about how Apple funded and trained China are instructional. The piecemeal nature of a neoliberal corporatised world lacks any big picture awareness. Shareholders are the priority for these multinational giants. Greater profitability is the name of the game at whatever cultural cost. Humanity is once again rapidly descending in value for these companies despite being their ultimate reason for existing.”
Companies Globally Rushing Into AI
The decades of neoliberalism, we have experienced, has seen the creation of mega-corporations via mergers and takeovers. Privatization has seen the shifting of public assets worth hundreds of billions moved into private investor hands. The workforce inside these multinational companies is huge. In the current AI arms race, these companies are rushing to invest billions in AI, just in case they get left behind. Is rushing into anything ever a good idea? Competitive forces are impatient to see massive job losses and the replacement by AI. Those who are always focused on the economic bottom line are making out that this is all inevitable. It’s not. Resisting AI: Over-Automation is not inevitable.
A Lot Of AI Is Marketing Hype
A hell of a lot of stuff written and said about AI is marketing hype. AI is not the best solution for every situation. AI is not inescapably a better option than humans. Bean counters, however, are motivated to see AI as the answer via their limited vision. Making stuff cheaper is not going to be the massive improvement if lots of folk have lost their incomes and can’t afford to buy the products. 300 million job losses will not be magically absorbed and the lost workers will not, at the click of the fingers, find suitable employment alternatives. History tells us this following earlier mass changes to labour like the industrial revolution and the shift from agriculture to manufacturing. Big companies and politicians have been content to let these folk become economic collateral damage in the past. This time it will be the dislocation of hundreds of millions of people. It will break up and destroy families and lives. Yet, the money men say we have to do this so that we can increase productivity and make more money for investors. It is the super wealthy sacrificing the working poor for their own further enrichment. Trump is a sign of this already happening.
Fighting The AI Juggernaut
Businessmen, and it is largely men in these positions of power, are not automatically the best people to be making these decisions. These are life changing and mass human being shifts being undertaken for the highly limited reason of making greater shareholder returns. In many ways, this is herd mentality, as these corporate CEOs and bean counters are in a race to automate with AI. Why? So that they can hopefully get a competitive advantage over their competitors. Governments have become cheer leaders spruiking the unerringly positive narrative pushed by the PR companies employed by AI and the multinationals. Who is taking the devil’s advocate position regarding AI? No one or very few and they have no money. However, we the consumers can take up this fight if we are keen to do so.
Governments & Corporations
The mechanisation of labour in industry has seen huge reductions in jobs in mining, manufacturing and agriculture. Governments usually fall into line behind big corporations on the basis of their capital investments in nations and the jobs they provide their citizens. The reality now, however, is that these jobs are minimal and these corporations do their best to minimise paying tax and royalties, wherever possible. They employ small armies of accountants and lawyers. These corporations have grown massive with the financial clout to threaten governments. Politicians are bought and sold by these companies via lobbying and the revolving door, where very well paid jobs for the boys post politics are dangled attractively. Big business has the ear of government through their campaign donations and presence in the spheres of power. AI is going to cost our nations and communities millions of jobs. Make government accountable about this.
It may look cute but it will take your job!
Resist Rather Than Going Quietly
As adult human beings, let us not go quietly into the night. Let us not apathetically allow AI automation, which replaces human labour enmasse, to happen without some tough questioning. It does not matter that these are privately owned companies because our governments have allowed privatization to occur over the last few decades.
Resisting AI: Over-Automation is not inevitable. It is not necessarily better in every case. Technology is not always best. We are learning that now, slow learners we may be, that social media is not an undeniably improvement culturally. The digital world is full of holes and we are losing billions to scammers every day. Banks no longer look after our money, as our security has been traded aways for convenience instead. Russian bots are manipulating us vis disinformation. AI is making life much easier for scammers and disinformation agents. Much of the Internet is fraudulent. The online space is a portal connecting nefarious realms with you and your assets. The people pushing AI are in it for the money primarily. We are being sold something that will damage permanently hundreds of millions of human beings. Oligarchy is driving us like Bisen over the cliff so that they can replace us with machines. This world is our world as much as it is their world – are we going to fight for it or roll over?
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump.
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