AI executives like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have been forecasting an incipient AI jobs apocalypse for three years now. So where is it? Well it’s here, kind of. But instead of replacing tens of millions of workers, it’s mostly making them miserable.
Yes, across the US, workers are souring on AI, and they’re increasingly outspoken about it. In the newsletter earlier this week, I dissected a new report from Glassdoor that documents how workers are becoming more and more negative towards AI—right about the same time that tech CEOs have promised that the products would be making everyone’s working life easier and more streamlined.
The data paints a pretty clear picture: Just as people are getting fed up with data centers, Meta AI glasses, and AI in general, they’re getting angrier about bosses pushing AI on them in the workplace, too.
To discuss all this and more, I sat down with the sociologist, AI researcher, and writer Dr. Alex Hanna. Hanna is a director at the Distributed AI Research Institute, the co-author of the AI Con, and a founder of the Luddite Lab, which offers resources to workers who are navigating and confronting AI in their workplaces. It was a great conversation.
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Some media stuff: I was on the Tech Report last week, had a good chat about the data center backlash and AI sentiment:
And here’s the audio from an event I did in LA last week with the great writer Joanne McNeil, two booksellers, and a librarian who works with rare books. We discussed AI companies’ efforts to scan and destroy books en masse, reported by 404 Media and others, and more:
New York Bans AI in Public Schools from Kindergarten-8th Grade
New York City, home to the largest public school district in the nation, has banned AI in classrooms from Kindergarten to eighth grade for at least a year. The New York Times reports:
When New York City public schoolchildren return to the classroom next week, younger students will be barred from using artificial intelligence. No individual screens will be allowed until third grade. And teachers will not be able to ask A.I. to grade assignments.
Those rules on technology use are part of a sweeping new policy announced on Wednesday by the city’s Department of Education that will place strict limits on digital devices and A.I. tools in the city’s school system — the nation’s largest — particularly for its elementary and middle-school students.
Still, some parents and groups that had called for a two-year moratorium on A.I. in schools said that the guidelines were disappointing.
Under the rules, about 600,000 students in the city’s schools — about two-thirds of all students in New York City public schools — will not be allowed to use A.I. until they enter high school, and even then, it will be permitted only in specific cases.
This is how it’s done; simple, clear policy that minimizes ambiguities. Still, I’m not sure why the ban wasn’t just made permanent.
California passes 20+ bills to rein in AI and big tech
Regardless, it’s clear that all this anxiety and anger over the encroachment of AI into our workplaces and public spaces can be channeled into productive solutions. Right now, in California, union leaders, led by Lorena Gonzalez, the head of the California Federation of Labor Unions are calling on Gavin Newsom to pass a sweeping slate of bills protecting workers from surveillance and exploitation. And politicians have answered the public call for more oversight with bills aimed at regulating social media use and algorithmic discrimination.
As NBC reports, “California Democrats pass more than 20 bills to curtail AI and social media”:
Many of the 26 bills related to AI and social media that California’s Democrats passed during the final week of their legislative session further seek to curtail some of the features tech companies offer that experts warn are addictive, while others would explicitly pull back the use of AI in various facets of everyday life.
One bill passed would ban social media companies from providing “addictive features” — including autoplaying videos — to users under 16 years old, while another would tighten the state’s existing restrictions on chatbots for use by minors by implementing landmark age verification requirements and rules related to what ads minors can see. That bill, as well as another measure, would also make social media platforms and AI chatbots liable for financial damages if they don’t take measures to protect children from harm.
Experts have said those bills could help create the most robust framework in the country designed to protect minors using AI chatbots and social media…
On the AI front specifically, one bill passed would require all instructors in the California State University system to be human beings, not AI bots, though instructors could still use AI as part of their offerings to students, while another bill passed would ban employers from using AI surveillance products that collect “neural data” that helps employers “recognize” their workers’ “emotional state.” Another would bar retailers from using certain forms of dynamic pricing, identified in the bill as “surveillance pricing.”
A number of other bills pertain to regulating the use of AI in the healthcare space.
One bill would require that therapy and psychotherapy be provided only by qualified, licensed professionals and explicitly bar them from offering services for therapy and psychotherapy that are provided by chatbots or companion chatbots.
Another one would tighten how healthcare providers use AI and chatbots, attempting to make clearer that such machines are still subject to existing medical information confidentiality laws.
There is, in other words, a real opportunity for workers to push back on AI overreach right now, and many different ways for them to take it.
The human labor that make Waymos possible
The Bay Area Current’s Stephanie Reist has a great, eye-opening interview with a Waymo ‘handler’, a worker in charge of keeping the self-driving cars running smoothly, and, well, keeping them clean. From their chat:
Robotaxi Handler: A morning worker and a swing shift worker make $29 an hour. You get a $2 bump if you’re an overnight worker, 10pm to 6:30am. So overnight workers make $31 an hour. You get an extra dollar on top of that if you work both Saturday night and Sunday night.
Current: Because those are the busier nights. Is that when the job is the hardest, cleaning puke, weekend nights?
Robotaxi Handler: Yeah, typically that’s when there’s the most throw-up, the most disgusting things in the back. Even poop, there’s a lot of cleaning up poop.
Current: A lot?
Robotaxi Handler: Way more than you think. One time there were two pig heads in the backseat of the car and the cleaner had to clean it up. I assume they just went to the market to make a stew or something, but they forgot their pig heads. They were just rolling around in the back of the car.
The Future is Not Tech-Forward
So says my friend and fellow Luddite Edward Ongweso Jr , in a barnburner of an essay interrogating recent claims that the left is not tech-forward enough.
Here’s a taste:
If, it turns out, the technical arrangements that sustain this technological development require a political and social order which further unravels the threadbare remnants of our democracy, it’s not clear why opposition to it should be labeled as a primitivist or atavistic. Foreclosure is seen as legitimate when imposed from above—as above so below! We can and should foreclose certain arrangements, in fact we already do! Do we embrace germline editing? CFCs? Do we read all concerns about forever chemicals or other bio-accumulative toxins as yearning for a simpler time? Do you reject a tech-forward future when you raise concerns about how the miracle of telehealth makes it cheaper than ever to open up your very own pill mill? When you recoil in disgust at the financialization of everything, to the metastasis of prediction markets beyond app-based sports betting to betting on any sort of event big or small, does that suggest you want to turn the clock back? Or does it suggest you view these developments as corrosive to the political and social order we have? Do we block certain technologies because we are ruled by a cabal of primitivists stalking the halls of power, or because everything we develop is not an unalloyed good which can and should be spread far and wide?
Read the whole thing:
Finally, I appreciated this appeal from the great labor magazine In These Times’ cartoonist Matt Bors, so I thought I’d share it here, too:
I’m so fucking tired of AI slop and engagement bait. I just want to make comics.
If I even bother to scroll anymore, I see endless garbage, misinformation, and now—fake cartoons made by big tech’s water-gulping theft engines. You know what I’m talking about. The videos and comics with that suspicious sheen, that uncanny and flattened cartoon style that seems to beg, “mindlessly share me without thinking!”
When I started drawing political cartoons in 2003, magazines and alternative newsweeklies still ran comics. The internet was a hopeful frontier for (human) creativity. Then corporate chains gobbled up print publications and shut them down. The flourishing, well-funded new media sites of the 2010s collapsed as social media pivoted to algorithmic garbage and the rich founders moved on to data centers, gambling apps, and force-feeding us AI.
Now we have slop. They want you to eat it and ask for seconds. Today you have to make the case for cartoons thought up by real human brains and drawn by real human hands. So I’m making the case.
Alright, that’s it for today. Thanks everyone for reading, as always. Take care and stay human out there.
