At the end of May, we finally got some good news: artificial intelligence has enabled the development of an antibiotic that can kill an exotic superbug resistant to all existing antibiotics. Using artificial intelligence, the algorithm mapped thousands of chemical compounds in key proteins of Acinetobacter baumannii, a bacterium that causes pneumonia and wound infections so severe that the World Health Organization has named it one of the three "greatest threats" to humanity.
When the mapping was completed, the artificial intelligence offered an effective drug with properties that existing antibiotics did not possess. The production of medicine that saves human lives would not be possible without artificial intelligence. It is an epoch-making scientific achievement.
But this story also has a dark side. Do you remember Chris Smalls, the Amazon worker who organized a strike at a warehouse in Staten Island, New York over working conditions during the pandemic?
Smalls briefly rose to fame when it was revealed that after his firing, rich and powerful Amazon executives organized a teleconference where a campaign was planned to smear Smalls and his struggle in the public eye. Despite everything, a few years later Smalls managed to found the first (and so far the only) formally recognized union of Amazon employees in the United States. Today, similar attempts are being countered using the same technology that produced the antibiotic for the superbug.
Smalls' success was a blow to Amazon managers who had been taught for years to use all means, legal and illegal, to prevent unionization. A manager training video, leaked in 2018, was devoted to recognizing symptoms of worker self-organization. Managers have been advised to install surveillance cameras outside Amazon's warehouses to spot workers who hang around after the end of their shift and perhaps persuade colleagues to join the union. They are also encouraged to eavesdrop on employees' conversations and pay attention to key words such as "living wage" or "feeling exhausted."
Soon the primitive surveillance methods were replaced or at least supplemented by new software packages. In 2020, Recode reported that Amazon had purchased a geospatial console (SPOC) to monitor union-friendly workers. Vice magazine showed how Amazon's human resources department monitored employees' mailing lists and Facebook groups in order to predict possible gray strikes, work stoppages and similar collective actions.
This software groups the characteristics and behaviors of workers based on how close they are to union initiatives. However, the demonstrated predictive powers did not satisfy Amazon bosses, so the company instructed regional managers to continue monitoring workers in the old way.
Now all that is overshadowed by the possibilities brought by artificial intelligence. Why spy on employees, eavesdrop on them, or monitor their Facebook posts with special software, if a centralized artificial intelligence is capable of detecting all pro-union phrases and behaviors in every Amazon warehouse, automatically, in real time, and for free?
The fact that the same scientific breakthroughs that made it possible to find a cure for the superbug are being used in the fight against unions is particularly disturbing. Before artificial intelligence, researchers grouped molecules as vectors that did or did not contain certain sets of chemicals. That process was no different—and no more effective—than using SPOC software to group workers according to their estimated propensity to unionize.
On the other hand, the artificial intelligence that created the new antibiotic uses neural networks and machine learning models that have made it possible to explore chemical spaces that would have taken humans decades to explore. The same systems are trained to analyze the molecular structure of the bacteria's proteins and find compounds that are likely to kill it.
Artificial intelligence uses the same process to suppress union organizing. The difference is that instead of chemical spaces and molecules, the subjects of research are the warehouses and the workers who live in them, workers whose data is continuously collected in real time using electronic devices that they have to carry with them while at work - even when they go to the toilet. .
AI-based systems independently learn to develop strategies to neutralize a chosen target, whether it's a group of proteins inside a bacterium or a group of workers in a break room. Artificial intelligence decomposes the target into vectors that are then used to maximize the probability of elimination.
It was inevitable. Humanity has proven to be capable of developing artificial intelligence and algorithms that decode the protein structure of bacteria - without additional human intervention - and suggest effective drugs. Did anyone think that conglomerates like Amazon wouldn't seize the opportunity to identify and eliminate those positions in the supply chain where artificial intelligence determines a high likelihood of unionization attempts?
Economists confidently claim that the laws of supply and demand will ensure that technological change always works in our favor. It is a delusion that helps them look away and ignore the malignant forms of class struggle unfolding before them, destroying the lives of millions of people and creating a macroeconomic environment incapable of generating sufficient demand (certainly not without unsustainable borrowing) for the quantities of goods that technology can produce.
Warren Buffett, a man who became rich primarily thanks to ignoring the delusions in which economists live, once said that the class struggle is both real and that his class is so superior in that struggle that it would win with its hands tied. This was before digital devices fed by algorithms replaced foremen in the production halls and imposed a pace of work and a regime of supervision that makes the factory of Chaplin's Modern Times look like a working-class paradise. As if that wasn't enough, now artificial intelligence will allow conglomerates to eliminate the only institution that gave workers at least a modicum of power in a world where they have virtually no power: labor unions.
The class war that Warren Buffett talks about is turning into a war between capital in the cloud, armored by artificial intelligence, and the world's precariat, doomed to forever remain on the losing side. Whatever political views we represent and whatever our aspirations are, it should be clear to all of us that such an economy is neither acceptable nor sustainable.
(Project Syndicate; Peščanik.net; translation: Đ. Tomić)
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