Unfortunately, the mass automation of jobs is not a new occurrence; those in power have been attempting to do away with those pesky workers and all the money they require to live for quite a long time. AI systems provide a new way to try to minimize those costs. While executives suggest that AI is going to be a labor-saving device, in reality it is intended to devalue labor by threatening workers with technology that can supposedly do their job at a fraction of the cost.
Virtually anything in banking could be done by AI. A single software update by Anthropic got rid of an entire strata of the legal profession. Once everybody was saying you should become a programmer. The former chief of Google, Eric Schmidt, said that they won't need programmers anymore. They only need them for supervising, for checking, for systems design. But AI will soon be able to do that. They're advising you to study things like English literature, history, the classics.
There was a report a few months ago by the American research company, Citrini, which came up with a very alarming scenario that AI would take over more jobs than we thought. It will be the first technology ever that destroyed more jobs than it creates. All the other technological innovations of the past, electricity, the steam engine, the internet, created more jobs than it destroyed. But there is another scenario.
The AI industry pays a pittance to many people to train their AI models. There is work called content moderation - cleaning the data that they use to feed into their models. This category of work is generally called data work. It is literally the work that the AI industry needs to make their technologies exist. This kind of work has become the number 4 fastest growing job in the US, according to a Linkedin report from earlier this year.
In the vast majority of cases, AI is not going to replace your job. But it will make your job a lot shittier. It will turn work into a gig work version so that they can take your expertise and your knowledge. There are extremely highly educated individuals with college degrees, master's degrees, PhD degrees, law degrees, and also people who have been working within different industries as scientists or lawyers or doctors for years who are now turning to such data work as another job.
These are incredibly awful jobs to work. In one podcast, there was a story about one woman who was an Ivy League PhD graduate who then applied to 200 jobs and didn't get any of them, so she ended up in data work. She described an extremely piecemeal, anxious process where she's drip-fed this data work. An email will arrive in her inbox informing her that a project is available for a certain amount of money and asking her if she wants it.
You never know when it's going to arrive. You never know when it's going to go away. And it pits different workers against each other because the people who claim the work fastest are the ones that actually get the opportunity. What exactly are these PhDs doing? Companies will tell you that their models are going to arrive at PhD level intelligence. They hire PhD level workers to try and teach this knowledge to the models so that they have the trappings of PhD level intelligence.
But the data work is so poorly organized that the AI models are actually not very effectively capturing their expertise. For example, a PhD in philosophy would be overseeing other PhDs in math, chemistry, biology etc. None of them would be actually evaluating tasks within their domain of expertise. So actually, AI is not taking on the boring jobs as had been claimed. It's taking on the interesting jobs like design and people are stuck with the drudgery of bureaucracy.
Why would anyone then pay tons of money to get training in college, in a PhD program when this is what is awaiting them on the other side? It's a very naive and pretentious thing from a few people to believe that 99% of the people have no desire in life, that nobody else (other than them) has a desire to to do things that are beautiful and smart. If it's true that such machines are going to change the workplace in a way that's going to put a lot of people out of work, even if we give them money for free, they're not going to be happy.
MIT Institute Professor Darren Asimoglu, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2024, said that if Silicon Valley gets what it wants and successfully uberizes most knowledge work, then the kind of inequality that we would experience is something that we would have never seen before, where most workers are sidelined for meaningful work and only a few companies actually employ most workers as well.
No wonder several speeches praising AI at commencement ceremonies across the US were booed by the students. Recent graduates at the University of Central Florida and the University of Arizona booed speakers who compared the advent of AI to the Industrial Revolution and the development of the laptop and smartphone. They have revealed a disconnect between the executives championing AI and students.
A national survey conducted for NBC News earlier this year polled 1,000 registered voters in the US and found only 26% view AI positively and 46% view it negatively. AI scored worse than US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Donald Trump and Kamala Harris on the same poll, but better than the Democratic party and Iran. Anger against AI is growing – from communities protesting against data centers powering the AI boom, to workers disputing their CEOs’ claims that AI can, effectively, replace them.
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