#Marx #Marxism #Capitalism #BigTech #AI #Automation: "The tech industry is structured for groupthink. It needs a perpetual supply of shiny new paradigms to impel new waves of investment. Generative AI seems to be the latest one. Still, there is more substance to generative AI than to cryptocurrency or the metaverse, which were the most recent candidates for the next new thing. Crypto never managed to become anything more than a casino, and the metaverse barely exists. By contrast, generative AI has all sorts of obvious use cases. It also has a “wow factor” that helps get the blood and capital flowing. ChatGPT, Midjourney, and the like may not signal the imminent arrival of an artificial superintelligence—I have my doubts—but they do demonstrate real technical sophistication of the kind that we didn’t see in, say, NFT apes.
As for what this shift means for worker struggles, it is important to note that generative AI is a labor-intensive technology. The data on which AI systems are trained needs to be sorted and labeled by humans. The outputs also need to be evaluated, especially to prevent AI interfaces from engaging in racist outbursts or other undesirable behavior. Most of the people who do this work are poorly paid; some are starting to organize. In May, a group of more than 150 Nairobi-based workers who helped to create ChatGPT and who maintain Facebook and TikTok voted to form a union. This is the sort of struggle that deserves the close and careful attention of journalists and organizers. AI tends to be presented in popular discourse as quite abstract, but at root it’s profoundly industrial, and the working conditions of the people turning its cranks can be downright Dickensian."
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/09/16/a-marx-for-all-seasons/
Miguel Afonso Caetano /
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2023-09-17 12:43:25
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2023-09-17 12:43:25Event JSON
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"content": "#Marx #Marxism #Capitalism #BigTech #AI #Automation: \"The tech industry is structured for groupthink. It needs a perpetual supply of shiny new paradigms to impel new waves of investment. Generative AI seems to be the latest one. Still, there is more substance to generative AI than to cryptocurrency or the metaverse, which were the most recent candidates for the next new thing. Crypto never managed to become anything more than a casino, and the metaverse barely exists. By contrast, generative AI has all sorts of obvious use cases. It also has a “wow factor” that helps get the blood and capital flowing. ChatGPT, Midjourney, and the like may not signal the imminent arrival of an artificial superintelligence—I have my doubts—but they do demonstrate real technical sophistication of the kind that we didn’t see in, say, NFT apes.\n\nAs for what this shift means for worker struggles, it is important to note that generative AI is a labor-intensive technology. The data on which AI systems are trained needs to be sorted and labeled by humans. The outputs also need to be evaluated, especially to prevent AI interfaces from engaging in racist outbursts or other undesirable behavior. Most of the people who do this work are poorly paid; some are starting to organize. In May, a group of more than 150 Nairobi-based workers who helped to create ChatGPT and who maintain Facebook and TikTok voted to form a union. This is the sort of struggle that deserves the close and careful attention of journalists and organizers. AI tends to be presented in popular discourse as quite abstract, but at root it’s profoundly industrial, and the working conditions of the people turning its cranks can be downright Dickensian.\"\n\nhttps://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/09/16/a-marx-for-all-seasons/",
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