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Big Tech is selling us a future in which workers are increasingly disposable, human expertise is devalued, and corporate power is more concentrated than ever. But is that future inevitable? In this episode of Movement Memos, host Kelly Hayes talks with Alex Hanna, co-author of The AI Con, about AI as a tool of class warfare, the hype that obscures its real-world harms, and how workers are organizing to resist Big Tech’s agenda and win meaningful protections in the workplace.

Music: Son Monarcas and Guustavv

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today we are talking about how workers can resist automation and AI in the workplace. We’ll be hearing from Alex Hanna, co-author of the book, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want. Alex is a writer and a sociologist of technology, labor, and politics. Alex is also the director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, and leads the organization’s Luddite Lab project. The greatest promise of AI in the business world is the promise that it will eliminate workers. Some people have already felt those impacts. But far more often, we are seeing AI leveraged to surveil, control, and devalue workers. So, how is AI impacting our work lives, what’s on the horizon in the struggle, and how are some workers fighting back and winning?

We’ll get into that and more as we discuss what we’re up against, and what kind of political education workers need to wage a strong fight.

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Kelly Hayes: Alex Hanna, welcome to Movement Memos.

Alex Hanna: Thanks for having me, Kelly.

Kelly Hayes: How are you doing today?

Alex Hanna: I am recovering from whatever is in the air, but I am soldiering through.

Kelly Hayes: Well, thank you for joining us while you’re still recovering. I really appreciate it, and I’m so glad you’re on the mend. I know a lot of our listeners will be familiar with your work, but for the unacquainted, what would you like people to know about who you are and what you do?

Alex Hanna: Yeah, so I am a sociologist and writer on labor, tech, and politics. I’m director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, and we’re a research institute that researches the present-day harms of AI. I feel like I have to say that now, because there’s a lot of imaginary harms that are in the conversation now. And we also develop community-based technology. And so then what I focus quite a lot on is understanding the connection of AI and labor and work, as well as working and understanding the kind of ecosystem of who’s in the AI space and what political incentives that they have. And so I have a book called The AI Con, which I co-authored with Dr. Emily M. Bender. And I also have a podcast with her called “Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000.”

Kelly Hayes: Which is such a great name for a podcast. I am really excited to talk about your work, and in particular your work around AI and labor, including the work you’re doing with the Luddite Lab. But before we go deep on labor, I feel like we have to wade through some of the AI headline muck that folks are dealing with right now.

Recently, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark declared that “the singularity” has begun. He made this announcement at a gathering of economists and policy makers at the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and World Bank meetings. And earlier this month, Anthropic announced that it was prohibiting any sustained cruelty towards its AI models amid an ongoing debate within the industry about whether these systems might be conscious or have some kind of moral status. (Spoiler alert: They do not.)

So we’re being told on the one hand that these technologies are ushering in a transformation of human civilization that’s beyond our control or soon will be. And on the other hand, we’re being asked to contemplate whether the products themselves might be sentient beings whose welfare we need to consider. These extraordinary claims, which always seem to come from the people building and selling these products, are often received with great seriousness by the press, which I think only compounds public confusion. So, what are your thoughts on this?

Alex Hanna: Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of thoughts on this. I mean, I have thoughts on the claims of singularity or AGI, which is artificial general intelligence. I have thoughts on Jack Clark as a person and a figure in this space. And then thoughts on the ways in which they’re tied up together. Jack Clark is kind of an interesting figure because he used to be a policy person at OpenAI. And then I actually have been reading [or have at least been attentive to] his newsletter for years now. And it’s kind of interesting the ways in which he has gone from someone who had some interesting things to say about AI and interesting things to say about policy, to someone who’s very much bought into the narrative of things like the singularity, this hypothetical event in which human beings all merge into a singular kind of consciousness with the machine.

This is an idea that’s been proffered by someone named Ray Kurzweil, who is a futurist who has worked at Google for the last number of years. And it’s this fantastical idea that comes from science fiction. And what’s not new is that there’s claims about the singularity is already here, the same thing with artificial general intelligence. Oh, it’s already here. This is something that [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman has said. And so you have this thing where there is this model of the world that at one point, is eschatological, like it’s: We’re going to have the rapture, we’re going to have the end times. And now as an economic move, these people within these companies have said, “Well, it’s already happening. We’re starting to be raptured. We’re starting to be moving into this space.”

And you’re like, “Ah, okay.” So your model of the world has changed from kind of an end times type of Christian, everybody’s going to merge into this one thing and there’ll be this tipping point to, well, it’s actually already happening and this is very important. And it just gives the game away that Jack Clark is giving the speech to the IMF, this neoliberal organization that has done so much damage in the majority of the world through structural adjustment programs and the ways that they are forcing austerity spending by their client governments. It’s effectively saying we need to revamp this element of trade policy or whatever the IMF is funding to accommodate for this kind of fantastical thinking. And so that’s definitely one thing that that signals.

The element of the model welfare thing, the idea that the models could just feel pain, I mean that’s this kind of thing which is — this has been around for quite a bit of time. And there was this thing that happened a few weeks ago where there was this GitHub repository … So GitHub is a code-hosting platform that is currently owned by Microsoft. And there was these sets of experiments that were created when this person who read this paper that said, “Well, if we were going to simulate pain in a language model, this is what it would look like.” And so this person developed this repository, this bunch of code where they were simulating intense amounts of pain that would be afflicted to a model. And then it was just an incredibly ridiculous event because there were many people — many users on the platform were then targeting this person saying, This person is literally torturing models and they’re putting the code on the web. And what an inane timeline because now there’s this focus on this idea that models are aware and they’re conscious and they can feel pain.

And to what degree are we — what evidence is given that a model can do that? These are big piles of linear algebra, that is effectively, I mean, that is not what is happening. And what really gives it away to me too is these are people who are more defensive of big piles of linear algebra than they are of real human beings, of Black and Brown people, of people in poverty. And this has been said by a lot of people in many different guises, but it’s effectively like people in this field seem to care a lot more about hypothetical, maybe conscious piles of linear algebra, rather than people in actual pain in the world right now. And that just tells you all you need to know about their ideology and how they view the humanity of people who are in the margins.

Kelly Hayes: Absolutely. And I think all of this goes back to how we have to think about AI conceptually, because we’re being pulled in a lot of imaginary directions. So it’s important to stay really grounded. You’ve argued in your work that AI isn’t even a coherent set of products and services; it’s a marketing term. It’s used to describe not just chatbots, but a wide range of computational services, including things that existed well before the era of chatbot hype. And AI, in addition to being a sort of product genre, should also be understood as a political project. It’s at the center of an effort to reshape social and economic relations and create new forms of dependency and control.

The devaluation of human beings, our thinking, our well-being, and our labor is the crux of that project. And what you said about how we’re being told to fret about the emotional well-being of models, when actual living, breathing people in the margins don’t get that level of concern from these tech oligarchs — it really is emblematic of what’s happening in a larger sense. We have hyper-exploited people in the Global South, whose labor keeps these platforms running, and never once have I heard one of these tech leaders say: We have to stop and think about how our use of these platforms is harming these human beings, because they’re suffering. Just like you don’t hear them talking about the people with asthma and other health problems who are negatively impacted by data center pollution. This project wants us to forget those people, to forget each other, while centering the well-being of the technology. We’re meant to see ourselves and each other as less relevant, and less important to the future.

So there’s a way in which the cults of Silicon Valley are feeding their visions and aspirations into a more digestible popular discourse. You have effective altruists and accelerationists and people who see humanity as a kind of bootloader species, for a future where space is populated by trillions of digital beings. And this weird, fashy, sci-fi fantasy really adds up to the devaluation of most living people, here and now. And so, in some ways, that’s the most important thing to understand about any aspect of AI as a marketing effort, and as a political project, is really that it’s about our devaluation. That’s what every one of these talking points comes down to: how much AI is worth, even if it’s not turning a profit, and how little each of us matters, in the new scheme of things.

Alex Hanna: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that’s really hitting it on the nose. If you envision a few different elements of AI as a political project, you can see this devaluation of the human in a lot of different incarnations. And so I focus a lot on work and understanding that the primary economic rationale behind AI is obviating the need for labor. If there is some kind of way in which you can get rid of or automate so much of the work of human beings, then that means that you can just do massive layoffs and you don’t have to have folks who are real skilled laborers involved in the work process. And we’re seeing this in so many different industries, whether that’s health care, whether that’s education, whether that’s........

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