In early 2023, shortly after ChatGPT was released, a freelance writer named Jason Colavito posted on social media that a client was replacing him with artificial intelligence (AI), because it could write content for free. But the client also wanted to hire Colavito - at a fraction of his normal rate - to ‘rewrite’ the AI-generated text in different words.
This is not the first time that technology has slashed salaries instead of jobs, and the real problem is not AI. The problem is a culture that devalues human labour.
With the release of new AI applications, discussions about the future of work are resurging in full force. Will robots take all of our jobs? A recent study looked at professions in the United States, from poets to financial managers, predicting that 19 per cent will soon lose 50 per cent of their tasks to AI. But our previous experience with automation suggests it’s much more complicated than technology simply replacing human work.
In 2019, independent research organisation Data & Society studied how automation is being integrated in farm management and grocery stores. Counter to the popular belief that the technology was reducing the need for human labour, researchers Alexandra Mateescu and Dr Madeleine Clare Elish discovered that introducing new devices was mostly changing the nature of the work.
For example, automated check-out machines kept employees busy, because now they were assisting confused customers, troubleshooting machines and taking on other tasks to ensure their smooth operation in the store.
Most importantly, Mateescu and Elish discovered that the new tasks, which helped accommodate and implement the ‘automated’ technology, were often undervalued or even invisible.
Writer and filmmaker Astra Taylor calls this phenomenon ‘fauxtomation’. In her article The Automation Charade, she points to lost jobs and cut salaries where technology is introduced, despite the fact that people are still doing work around the machines.
Whether it’s the customer scanning their own biscuits at self-checkout, or the employee saving a robot that’s stuck in the parking lot, the new work is often deskilled, declared less valuable or made unpaid entirely.
We’re a far cry from being able to sit back and sip tea while the robots do work for us. In fact, we may experience the opposite. In More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave, historian Ruth Cowan documented how household labour (which remains invisible and unvalued) paradoxically increased with the introduction of ‘labour-saving’ devices like dishwashers and vacuum cleaners, because it also raised productivity and cleanliness standards.
Similarly, people may need to work more, not less, with more automation. For example, Washington University media professor Ian Bogost predicts that AI technologies like ChatGPT will end up creating more bureaucratic burden than actually saving effort. Over the past years, we’ve already seen warehouse workers follow timelines set by algorithms that penalise them for bathroom breaks, and drivers being squeezed like lemons in the app-enabled gig economy.
Meredith Whittaker, co-founder of AI Now and president of Signal, summed up the good and bad news about the future of work when she commented on Colavito’s freelance writing situation, predicting: “AI will not replace you. A person making half what you do with no benefits whose job is the same as yours was but now includes babysitting AI will.” That is the real automation charade, and it’s less about AI than we think.
Technology critics are sometimes called luddites, but maybe we should all be - in the true sense of who the Luddites were at least. The band of English factory workers that destroyed knitting machinery in the 19th century is remembered as being opposed to technological progress.
But a closer look reveals that the Luddites weren’t anti-machine at all. They were protesting against the manufacturers, who were using the new technology as an excuse to ignore standard labour practices.
The important thing to understand is that the current deskilling and devaluing of labour isn’t because the robots are coming for us - it’s cultural. A lot of our society’s willingness to view human workers as a replaceable commodity stems from the Fordist production model and ideology of the 20th century. But even though we’ve embedded that mentality in our current systems, it’s not the only way to treat human labour.
As jobs get disrupted and people’s livelihoods are threatened, it’s easy to point fingers at technology as the inevitable reason, whether you’re a pundit or an employer. But the real culprit is a political and economic system that puts profit above all else, and a society that is willing to let workers be mistreated. It’s a big thing to change, but it’s not set in stone. And that’s the real ‘robots and jobs’ conversation we need to be having.
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