On the smokescreen of AGI, and fighting for workers in the age of Trump and the tech oligarchy
Plus, protestors demand Amazon ditch its ICE contracts on the national day of protest.
Greetings everyone. Hope you all are hanging in there as everything continues to catch fire/freeze over. There’s been little meaningful fallout since the federal agents’ killing of Alex Pretti, other than the apparent dismissal of ICE figurehead Greg Bovino; operations are still continuing apace, Minneapolis is still in the streets, and Democrats abandoned the idea of using a shutdown threat as leverage. Tech workers do continue to call on executive leadership to condemn the administration and cancel ICE contracts—Silicon Valley CEOs have stayed quiet—and another day of work stoppage and protest is planned tomorrow, Friday, January 30th. NationalShutdown.org has a searchable map of actions across the US. I’ve received word that protestors are planning an ICE Out demonstration at an Amazon tech hub in Santa Monica. I’m planning on reporting on the event (otherwise, I’m observing the shutout) and I’ll include more details at the end of the post.
Despite the authoritarian headwinds, there are of course those working to keep democracy functioning. To that end, I was invited to speak at a meeting of California’s Legislative Progressive Caucus—a group of dozens of elected state assembly members—in San Francisco last week. The caucus is crafting its approach to its next legislative session, and I was asked to discuss AGI, labor, and tech policy in the age of Trump, along with co-panelists Emily Bender, the computational linguist at the University of Washington, computer scientist Margaret Mitchell, and AI researcher Deborah Raji. I thought I’d share my remarks with readers here, in case they’re of interest. I also wanted to note that I’m only able to do things like this thanks to my paying subscribers. Taking trips and preparing talks like this are entirely unpaid labor, and it’s only because I think it’s important to advocate for the worker, the human, and the user in the age of AI and big tech, that I undertake them. And subscribers make that work possible. Thank you.
I’m also pleased to report that I was impressed by the defiant attitudes and outlook of many members of the progressive caucus I spoke with.Tthey made calls for showing up in the streets for their communities and protesting ICE alongside them. They laughed off the Trump administration’s efforts to ‘ban’ AI lawmaking via executive order. Shortly after the meeting, assemblyman Alex Lee, the head of the progressive caucus, introduced legislation to eliminate tax breaks for companies that contract with the ICE or the Department of Homeland Security. Isaac Bryan, who I’ve actually interviewed in these pages before, about his No Robo Bosses bill, sponsored legislation to ban police officers from taking secondary employment with ICE. Unlike too many Democrats at the federal level, they appeared to have no intention of standing down.
Hello -
Thanks for having me, and for convening this listening session. I’ve been been reporting on the tech industry for over 15 years, and for the last five, I’ve been focusing on technology and labor. I wrote a book called Blood in the Machine about the history of worker resistance to automation, and the perennially misunderstood Luddite uprising.
With that in mind, there are a few points I want to hit on:
First, that the history of automation technologies can teach us a great deal about the present. From the power loom to the robotized assembly line to artificial intelligence, he ways that automation technologies impact working people tend to follow similar patterns.
One key lesson is that stories about the incredible power of a new technology have historically been used by entrepreneurs, bosses, and elites to override norms, standards, and laws, or bend them to their favor. Factory owners who adopted mechanized looms in the early 1800s argued that the rules on the books shouldn’t apply to them because they were using new and improved technology. On those grounds, they eventually convinced British Parliament to tear up most of the laws protecting cloth workers altogether. Decades of immense working class suffering ensued.
Today, a lot of tech CEOs right down the street from here are arguing much the same thing, calling for a moratorium on AI laws and deregulation—arguing that AI technology is so new and powerful it shouldn’t be beholden to any state laws at all.
A key to this agenda is the idea that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is about to arise and unleash untold economic and social benefits. This, too, I might note, is not new. Pro-business interests have been claiming that full automation is right around the corner for no less than two centuries. The inventor of the early computer, Charles Babbage, and the writer Andrew Ure notably did so in the 1800s, when they claimed autonomous, human-free factories were incipient—in part to rebut growing concerns over the brutal working conditions in real-world factories.
Now, generative AI is undoubtedly on many counts, novel, and technologically impressive. But I bring up all this historical context to remind us that we’ve been here before, with powerful interests using the specter of world-changing technology to concentrate power, justify trampling workers in the short term, and distract from the more immediate harms and impacts.
So that’s the second thing I want to underline here:
AGI, or an AI super intelligence should, in my opinion as a tech reporter and something of a historian of automation, be understood primarily as Emily Bender have described it: A marketing device. There are plenty of AI researchers who truly believe we are on the cusp of realizing an AI super intelligence, and there are plenty who do not. But figures like Sam Altman have realized that AGI makes for the ultimate story to sell partners and investors on his company and products.
OpenAI defines AGI as, and I quote from its official charter, still online today, “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” This is what it’s selling to enterprise clients around the world, and why so many companies have FOMO; no company wants to risk missing out on the ‘eliminate all labor costs’ machine. That’s ultimately why we have an AI bubble right now.
In fact, in researching a report for the AI Now Institute, I analyzed AI CEOs’ public usage of the term ‘AGI’, and found that it tended to correlate almost exactly to when they needed to raise a new funding round or distract from a PR scandal.
The third and last point I want to make is that, just as the dreams of the fully automated factory helped obscure real-world problems with factory conditions and child labor abuses in the 1800s, the AGI story is obscuring the fact that AI is causing a litany of real-world problems right now.
For one, it’s a motor behind the often reckless data center buildout that’s raising electricity bills, threatening water supplies, and impacting communities across the nation. But that’s all worth it, the AI companies say to states and municipalities eager to stay ahead of the curve, because AGI is around the bend.
Furthermore, many companies that buy AI firms’ enterprise software are buying into the AGI dream, too, and have indeed begun replacing workers’ jobs and tasks with AI, regardless of whether the technology is truly up for the task. So far, it’s usually not; the AI does a worse job than the human in nearly every case. But the AI is cheaper. So what you see happening a lot is firms executing layoffs—Salesforce, here in SF, for instance, cited AI as a driving force behind its most reason round of firings, as did Amazon recently—and then the remaining workers have to work extra hours to pick up the slack. In fact, after Amazon’s corporate leadership attributed its layoffs to AI, Amazon tech workers took the extraordinary step of issuing a public statement saying internal AI tools were not capable of doing their work, and that AI was an excuse to cut headcount.
This is happening in a number of different fields, not just tech. I run a series on my website called ‘AI Killed My Job’ in which I ask workers to share stories of how AI impacted their workplaces. I’ve heard from hundreds of workers at this point. And it is clear that AI *is* doing some real damage, especially to our creative industries here in California. Artists who’ve lost half of their clients to Midjourney and can no longer afford to pay rent. Translators who’ve anxiously watched their work dry up and are scrambling to change careers late in life. Copywriters who are instructed by bosses to feed their writing into a program so an AI model can train to become their replacement.
One of the stories I thought I’d shared here was one I received was from a man named Jacques, who was the copy chief for a tech company’s website and support pages. He oversaw all the documents that helped users understand how to use its product, and how to troubleshoot when something went wrong. He sent me this story in early 2025. I’ll quote from him:
“AI didn’t quite kill my current job, but it does mean that most of my job is now training AI to do a job I would have previously trained humans to do. I have no idea how entry-level developers, support agents, or copywriters are supposed to become senior devs, support managers, or marketers when the experience required to ascend is no longer available.”
I followed up with Jacques six months later, and he told me his company had laid him off. “I was actually let go the week before Thanksgiving now that the AI was good enough,” he wrote.
None of the above cases are happening, it’s important to underline, because there’s an AGI that is suddenly better than humans at telling stories, writing copy, creating art. People overwhelmingly prefer the work of humans to AI, in fact. But as with every significant automation technology past, AI is alluring for the simple reason that it lets bosses cut labor costs and exert more control over their workplaces.
The concern is that this idea of AGI is helping to cover for the rote, mass automation of lots of jobs I think we really want people to be able to do; translator, artist, actor, writer, therapists, nurses, I could go on — and if we allow it to continue apace, society will be all the poorer, more polluted, and beholden to systems controlled by a relative handful billionaires in Silicon Valley.
Industry interests will always try to use new automation technologies to justify undermining labor. It’s a recurring theme through automation history. They will tell stories about its power, its exceptionalism, to try to escape scrutiny and accountability for what’s actually happening. But there is absolutely no reason that any technology should not be subject to democracy, should not be shaped by the very people who must live with it. Technology should be built to benefit everyone—not just the powerful.
A final note: People are not only anxious about AI but angry about how it’s being forced on them in their workplaces, and what management is using it to do to their livelihoods. You’ve probably heard form your constituents. I just want to relay that I hear it from my interview subjects, from workers, students, and members of civil society, nearly every day. There is a lot of political power to be found in building solidarity against extractive AI companies, big tech and in strong action to curb their worse impulses—even, sometimes, refusing it.
Amazon is a major ICE contractor. Last year, it inked a $25 million deal to supply the agency with cloud compute services. As such, it makes for a compelling setting for a protest during tomorrow’s ICE out actions in Santa Monica. Details are below:
That’s it for this week. Take the day off tomorrow, and stay safe out there. Hammers up.