AI is Designed to Create A Massive Destabilized Labor Pool

One of the biggest debates about AI has been surrounding jobs, and the concern that it may replace jobs. 

There’s a lot to unpack here, but I think one of the most important points, is that VENTURE CAPITALISTS ARE FUNDING STARTUPS WHO ARE *TRYING* TO FUCK UP YOUR JOB. YOU MIGHT GET A NEW JOB OR SOMETHING, OR EVEN KEEP THIS ONE, BUT ITS GONNA SUCK WAY MORE, PAY WAY LESS, HAVE NO BENEFITS, AND IT WILL BE ADMINISTERED BY A TECH COMPANY.

We don’t use the AI for work; it works you. In a different world, a different economy, with different development processes, it could be different. What you see is not the inevitable result of AI. It is what they designed AI for and to do, and how they are going to use it; that is the actual problem here.

The venture capitalist consistent MO is to replace stable, living wage jobs with insecure, low paid jobs; these new, worse jobs are administered by tech monopolies and platforms that automate and supervise human labor and steal most of its earnings. For example, the Minnesota governor just veto-ed a bill requiring ride share companies to pay everyone a minimum wage. This is the type of thing that tech companies are doing all over the world so that they can continue to maintain power, control, leverage and financial exploitation over large, destabilized pools of workers with no protections. 

Venture capitalists are very fond of saying that yes, some jobs might be “freed up” and give way to, nebulously, “better jobs” (with no criterion, no promises, no programs proffered), and with no explanation of how these jobs are going to be established, and no commitment at all, to any workers; only the guarantee that they will be fighting us at our jobs, in the legislature, and against our unions, every step of the way. See: OpenAI paying Kenyans $1-2/hour to train the AI models. Or, Amazon’s ruthless crackdown on unionization here in the US. 

You can look at VC’s actions and know they don’t give a shit about building better jobs and more stable economies and better conditions for workers. You really trust them when they say this is going to be good for your job when they are literally paying people $1 an hour to work on cutting edge, highly profitable technological innovations? Or when they have refused for 30 years to pay the people who work on their tech campuses a reasonable wage? Or when they have been aggressively building out a cheap outsourced software development global talent pool for 20 years, so they can get code at rock bottom prices, and are now using coding AI to layoff and fire the people who contributed to it, their work stolen without permission, consent or payment to create a tool to justify turning even American programming jobs into gig labor? 

 Here we see VCs once more leaning on people’s belief in some magical free market that is somehow going to balance itself out and in fact, improve work because we have “better” technology. This is belied of course, by the fact that tech isn’t planning on providing these better jobs, and that it is explicitly instructing its startup portfolios and enterprise sales teams to go in and replace some jobs, damnit!  

What is most realistic, is that full-time jobs with benefits and potentially unionization and supervised by people, will be converted into gig work without benefits and without unionization, supervised by machines. This is really a shift in the MODEL OF WORK, and that shift — in the model — is what is truly at the core of AI as an economic engine.  

The transformation of good jobs to shit jobs is core venture capitalist DNA. That is how they roll. They have done this to transportation drivers, it has happened to cleaning professionals, massage therapists, culinary, food service providers, even Ikea has Taskrabbit, a gig work platform for people who assemble their products for their customers. Software engineering is already gig work for many people, and this becomes more and more the case as the contraction of money and power happens and even “good” jobs are under the microscope. 

The good jobs are the real target here. Not just jobs in general. But stable, well-paid, jobs where workers have a stake in the company, a voice on the job, and get benefits and have legal and union recourses. Think how much money, time, effort and pain in the ass this saves the System!

 It has happened to many blue collar roles which tech has pushed into gig work and refused to provide a living wage to through its platforms.  This only accelerated as the pandemic drove even more people into“entrepreneurship” — unstable, low paid job giving at least 30% of income to various tech platforms. Indeed, tech does provide alternatives — but it looks better to leave that speciously open as if anything could happen, rather than this being a part of the economic design of venture capital and technological development, and we have a pretty good bet of what that will look like: they are securing the workforce for THEM, on THEIR terms. These jobs they are disrupting will become jobs that tech and venture capital are in control of. 

And it is even happening to software developers, where AI trained on decades of human written code with no consent reached and no payment made, is presented as a “productivity tool” while AI is cited in mass programmer layoffs and contracting increased by 60% last year; a preview of the model they will be instantiating for everyone else as well. 

Hilariously, from the small team of engineers that developed Github Co-Pilot, a former employee recently came on Twitter to bitch that he only received $20,000 extra and a small promotion despite working on such a “ground breaking” project. This demonstrated a truly egregious lack of self awareness: Github CoPilot stole absolutely massive amounts of code, without paying anyone for it or asking anyone for their consent, and turned it into a tool that tech is now using to depress salaries, lay off full-time employees and expand a low-paid, global contract workforce.

 It is truly disgusting to me how tech employees are unable to connect what THEY experience — because surely, tech is exploiting them too — to the exploitation that is happening at the arms length of the tech that they build. This is a profound sense of individualism that goes through the field, that they expect to get paid a lot of money to literally build tools of labor exploitation for technofascists, then get upset when they themselves are also exploited. 

LMFAO but also cry, because why

WH

Y

And how 

HOW 

OpenAI is itself a great example of what the new corporate model looks like: a very small staff, massive collaboration across venture capital portfolios to fill technical demands, and reliance on extremely cheap outsourced labor; OpenAI was built also by contract workers in Kenya, who were paid only $1-$2 an hour while OpenAI itself raked in 11 billion in funding. 

And that is common practice. Meta has been doing that shit for more than a decade.

That extreme delta of exploitation is as core to OpenAI as it is to the products. This is an economic tool just as much as it is any fancy technical magic. Just because we don’t have a complete sense of the capabilities here or where they could go, doesn’t mean we don’t have a material picture of how this will play out and how it is already playing out. 

Because this was their plan. 

AI is what they need to get to the next level of penetration and perhaps what these platforms bring more than anything else, is the ability to destabilize the workforce for the companies they are selling to. And specifically to get into the white collar workforce, with artists, writers, marketing professionals, legal professionals, administrative staff, educators in the crosshairs of the technology, the subject of a banquet of new startups that are STUDYING these roles and FIGURING OUT how to automate their key tasks but most importantly, disrupt the economic arrangements within these field. 

It is surely possible and there is a world where automation and upgrades to technology, even including AI, are handled humanely and in a deliberant matter, with social guarantees of many kinds and contracts with actual humans who are most affected; but that is not the deployment model we are in. We are in an environment where there are deep economic incentives to destabilize labor and reduce the cost and complexity of labor for predatory corporations — including venture capital itself which must increase its workforce throughout this next bubble and growth cycle. They are getting their next population of cheap, exploitable labor. CREATING it. MANUFACTURING it.

 Venture capitalists are well aware that this will not create better jobs and they are well aware of how these technologies will be used in these environments. And they have done absolutely zero to address in a material way the fallout that will happen — the fallout they are counting on. While promising a new world of prosperity, this is a promise they have made over and over again for 30 years, the same people telling the same fucking story, and the story itself will be just the same as it has been for 30 years. Marc Andreessen’s new pseudo-manifesto on AI sounds exactly like him talking about every other technology development over the past 30 years. You can literally replace “AI” with “iPhone” and it still works. It’s the “we’re going to change the future”! And they never do. Just make it worse. Same shit, new shiny code jacket for fascism.

Read ‘em and weap. No other version of artificial intelligence could have come out of the economic machine that venture capital has built than what we see before us. Conway’s Law.

 This is an important point: while some consumer applications of AI will dominate the consumer world, most of the profit is there to be gotten from corporations, governments, intelligence agencies, institutions of all kinds. These institutions have a financial incentive to reduce the full time foot print and to push jobs out into the “edge”, or gig work territory, where they work on the cheap for tech platforms that dictate the pay and working conditions. 

We need to be thinking a lot more about VCs as creators and manipulators of large pools of workers and how they work to gain control over these large pools with technology tools and financial innovation aka significant increases to the level of exploitation.

Uber is obviously our quintessential example where even now, ride-share drivers in Nigeria are on strike, protesting the lack of a living wage. While it may seem like old news, the struggle of drivers against Uber is still alive, the resistance is still alive, the oppression is still expanding. It is tied to the struggles of workers for Bauer Transportation in the Bay, who fought bitterly and bravely for years to create better working conditions for the ones who keep the giant tech campuses running. We often experience tech as being ubiquitous but companies like Uber are still in the beginning of international expansion efforts where new pools of exploitable labor waits.

CREATING new pools of exploitable labor. 

VC bread and butter. 

At this point, their union-busting tactics, their political manipulation, the level of capital they can bring to bear on this, have been chiseled into a finely honed machine; but each place they invade and install this shit in, under the most exploitative terms they can bully and bribe their way into, is new to the venture capital threat and is new to fighting it. (That’s why we’ve been talking a lot about how to fight venture capital as a distributed system, not a monolith). 

 So, tech is both getting paid for doing this to workforces and also generating something it needs to thrive on: destabilized, underpaid, non-unionized workers. 

That is an absolutely vital part of the tech empire and it would crumble without this. All of tech is upheld by this specific type of labor; this labor PRODUCT, if you will, that is consistently being produced by the system; it is a system that is continuously generating this highly lucrative labor bank. They are incentivized to do this, they have done this in the past, this is the bedrock of their fortunes. That is the major piece that is being ignored here: not about the technical details of AI, but about what this looks like and how it functions as an economic machine. 

Fuck these people and fuck their AI. AI didn’t have to be like this. It was MADE to be like this. 

Again, they fucking hate us.