In the crosshairs of AI (part three)

In their mad rush for profit and power, the tech oligarchs have unleashed artificial intelligence (AI) into nearly every corner of life on this planet. Firms are investing billions in data centers, which house the infrastructure to process the enormous amounts of information that power AI. They are also plowing ever more money into research and development. Their hope is that the technology will overcome global capitalism’s slump, which the system has been trapped in since the Great Recession, and trigger a new epoch of expansion. States are incorporating it into their police forces for domestic surveillance as well as their militaries for cyberwarfare and high-tech weapons. Ominously, the struggle for AI supremacy is now at the center of the imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and China.

The widespread, unregulated use of AI is already having devastating impacts on our environment, jobs, and rights. Some worry that it threatens our very species with extinction. In this three-part interview, Tempest Collective’s Ashley Smith asks two advanced tech workers, Josh and Yasmine, about the technology, its much hyped promise and threat, and its impact on our lives. Most importantly, they lay out how the Left and labor movement should respond and what we should demand and fight for.

Read parts one and two here.

Part Three: What is To Be Done?

Ashley Smith: AI has led to a substantial debate on the Left. Many downplay its significance, contending that its nature and impact is vastly exaggerated. Others claim the exact opposite about AI, adopting the doom-speak of its boosters that use such talk to drive up their stock valuations and fuel the bubble. What’s your assessment of the various positions in this debate? What position do you think we should adopt?

Josh: I think I have outlined some of the debates on the Left, but before I go further, I want to state a few points of agreement. The Left is united in fighting for democratic control over our lives, work, and environment. This process involves struggles that can emerge outside what the Left itself initiates. For instance, the large movement against building new data centers was not sparked by organizations on the Left. But we still need to play an active part in it.

Even if I believe some claims about the use value of AI in helping us make medical breakthroughs are likely true, I don’t think that should be seen as contradicting the anti-data center movement. Like the fight for democracy in decision-making in tech workspaces, this is a fight for working people having a direct say in how we govern our lives. If we’re going to make AI breakthroughs, that’s more likely if we have that control and can direct how we use our resources.

The main disagreement I’ve outlined is about AI’s capabilities and potential. With regard to understanding the impact on jobs and imperialism, I think it is important, but even if we come to an agreement it does not automatically lead to unified conclusions. As I have stated, I don’t feel confident making any predictions.

Other disagreements among those on the Left include the debate between those who think we should abolish AI and those who think we should take it under our control. In some ways, those are not mutually exclusive. To do either means we need the power to make that choice! And I hope that through struggle we can get there and continue to have that debate on the way.

Finally, I think a big schism exists between the campists and the internationalist Left. The campists see any states that oppose, or are targets of, US imperialism as allies worthy of support. Internationalists believe that while we should primarily focus on opposing our own imperialist states as our enemies, we look to the international working class, including those exploited and oppressed by their lesser imperialist powers, as the main force capable of overthrowing capitalism and ending imperialism.

These positions lead to vastly different outlooks on states worldwide and their use of AI. While campists ignore or excuse the states they support in weaponizing AI against their own people, internationalists oppose such practices. We oppose the use of AI as a tool for state repression by any state. And we build international solidarity against it.

AS: Finally, many politicians are now calling for the regulation of AI. What do you make of their particular proposals? How should the Left and labor movement respond? What should we be demanding?

Yasmine: Bernie Sanders has proposed legislation to “ban super intelligence,” whatever that means. He, along with others, has also proposed creating oversight bodies, auditing frameworks, a kill-switch requirement, and so on. In general, I think we can benefit from any additional regulation and transparency.

But they’re woefully inadequate and don’t even attempt to address the actual harms already happening. Senators Jayapal, Representative Tlaib, and others introduced legislation to ban the use of facial recognition and biometrics by ICE. The Take It Down law passed last year requires platforms to take down nonconsensual AI-generated sexual content. These restrictions are worth supporting, and we should rally behind them. That said, we shouldn’t limit our sights to such limited reforms.

The organized Left should develop a holistic perspective regarding this tech, and our demands should reflect that. We must recognize that the tech oligarchs are trying to hardwire AI into nearly every aspect of our lives.

We’re in the midst of its construction—the data centers, the power and water infrastructure (mostly non-renewable) being set up to serve them, the camera and license plate readers being installed on every corner of our cities, the technical infrastructure being set up to enable different policing agencies to share and combine surveillance data and apply LLM analysis to it, the big tech AI contracts with public schools and with universities, and the systematic forced integration of AI in our day-to-day work tasks.

These are all the ways big tech is attempting to entrench this technology (built only to serve its interests) in our society. Our goal should be to halt this construction and to dismantle what has already been built. And to envision a different kind of future, one that isn’t the one the tech billionaires are trying to make inevitable.

The grassroots organizing against data centers has been remarkably successful and has won moratoriums on new data center construction around the country. We should be part of that effort, and we should push to make those moratoriums permanent. We should support legislation that seeks to place limits on AI use in the military or by ICE or cops, but we should demand that these limits turn into full bans and that they’re generalized to all uses, not to a subset of functions. I.e., a ban on autonomous weapons isn’t enough while AI continues to be used for surveillance and “target” generation.

I’ll add to the demand already raised by folks like No Azure for Apartheid, calling for the tech executives who have profiteered from genocide and mass murder to be held accountable and tried for their crimes against humanity. It’s an indisputable fact that tech infrastructure knowingly provided by Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Palantir, and others has been essential to the implementation of genocide and apartheid in Palestine.

We should also take an internationalist perspective and oppose economic and political imperialism that enables the violent harvesting of precious minerals, a violence both the US and China are engaged in. We should demand an end to the exploitation of people in the Global South and their lands for rare earth minerals, and we should be demanding that the companies who have profited from that exploitation compensate affected communities for the resulting health and environmental damage.

We should be clear about the fact that AI surveillance is no less dystopian and anti-working class when it’s wielded by the Chinese state than when it’s used here in the US. The carbon emissions from coal-powered data centers in China are as much a threat to our planet’s survival as the gas emissions here.

The sometimes eager adoption of AI reflects how resource-poor and desperate for some sort of edge so many institutions are. We should be demanding that public school systems pay their teachers, give them decent benefits, and hire more of them before they spend money on AI service contracts with Microsoft, Anthropic, or whoever. Same for universities. We should reject the attempt to use AI to compensate for healthcare providers’ lack of time and resources, and call for health care expansion and for Medicare for all. For god’s sake, I already spent only 10 minutes with my primary care physician, and now 5 of them are being spent on her asking the AI prompt how to diagnose my symptoms.

When we talk about data centers, we should recognize that the communities chosen for construction are typically rural and generally underserved and underfunded. Wherever workers have become dependent on data center construction jobs (however temporarily), we should call for a just transition, substantial severance pay, and long-term benefits. Better yet, we should campaign for infrastructure spending on things that will actually benefit these communities: public transit, renewable energy, climate resilience, and much more.

I understand that might sound like a fantasy to some, but let’s remember that in these same communities, everyday people got together and pushed back against the world’s most powerful companies along with their own local governments. I think they can win more, and I think this is the perfect opportunity for us to reimagine what we spend our resources and labor on and what we choose to build in our communities. I also think this is the best way to undercut the tech lobby’s jobs pitch and win folks like builders and electricians to our side.

As a tech worker, the long-term vision I organize for is democratic worker power. In some ways, everyone has a stake in tech worker organizing, because no other group of people has potential leverage over these companies and technology like the people who build and maintain it. And when the bubble bursts, bail out the people, not the tech oligarchs.

Josh: As Yasmine said, we have to understand the gravity of our situation. AI is being thrust into every aspect of our lives; our economy is precariously balanced upon it, the technology is being built with sweatshop labor, and it threatens to replace many jobs. All this is happening against the backdrop of the climate crisis and the new authoritarianism that Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have dubbed “End Times Fascism.”

We also have to admit that, even with the best intentions, it is not at all clear we can bring this technology under reliable control. Given this, a set of specific demands would be woefully inadequate. But here are what I think are the key issues and arenas of struggle.

Environment. The movement has already set a focus – stopping the expansion of data centers. This is part of the larger struggle for democracy, not just in the political domain but also the economic one; we can’t leave it to corporations to decide what gets built, where, and how. As Karen Hao has documented, these struggles are local, national, and international.

We must get involved in them and support their demands. We have to stop the reckless construction of these enormous blights in semi-rural environments and prevent them from driving up energy prices and soaking up all the groundwater. At the bare minimum, we must demand regulation of plant construction, renewable energy use, and sustainable water use. These demands are being refined and generalized in the struggle.

Labor. This will be a key battleground. The worst worker abuse is in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in the Global South. We must build international solidarity to demand regulation to ensure fair pay and better working conditions. More broadly, the workers’ movement will have to organize a fight back against the bosses’ callous application of the technology as an anti-labor tool.

As Cory Doctorow has underscored, the actors and writers union, SAG-AFTRA, set the example in how to fight the bosses’ use of AI. Rather than simply saying the technology should never be used, they have insisted on using it on their terms and under their control.

As this technology delivers productivity gains, which I argue it will, we need a way to address its impact. The bosses have already laid out their “solution”–Universal Basic Income (UBI) or, as Elon Musk likes to sell it, Universal High Income (UHI). But giving everyone a set amount of money will essentially just reset the floor; the UBI rate will become the new zero, eaten up by rent and food price increases.

Traditional demands around public healthcare, housing, transport and food will be much more effective at ensuring that human needs are met. The benefits of increased productivity have to be distributed amongst all of us, with shorter working hours and better quality of life. They make promises for this; we make demands.

In short, we should take the Luddite position that new technology should not be imposed upon us against our interests and that we should be the ones who control how it is made and introduced, and if not, we will smash it.

War and Surveillance: No war! No spying! In particular, in the US right now that means saying: Stop the Attacks on Iran and Abolish ICE! At home, we have to prevent networked surveillance companies like Flock from helping build a police state that can spy on us everywhere.

One of our top priorities in the US is resisting imperialist and nationalist demands to increase its war machine’s AI capabilities. Military spending has increased every year under every administration, and it must be stopped.

Tech workers have been organizing against their companies’ involvement in war, genocide, apartheid, spying, and border control. As Yasmine mentioned, the tech bosses have responded to these campaigns with targeted layoffs and firings. To defeat them, we need a mass movement against such weaponization of AI.

Abroad, we need treaties like the nuclear non-proliferation agreements and prohibition on biological weapons. These have never been enough, but they are worthy reforms we can organize around and use to build international networks that can become the basis for more radical demands.

Alignment – theirs and ours. Tech oligarchs have been scrambling to spin technology positively even as they warn of its inherent risks. Because they don’t want to face the financial blowback that tobacco and social media have suffered, they have developed their version of AI alignment, promising that their technology’s goals and behavior will match what people actually want—our values, rules, and intentions. It is a business imperative.

“Business imperative” is a great term, it has a lot of explanatory power. It is their equivalent of Marx’s “mute compulsion,” which determines corporate decision-making under capitalism. Market competition drives everything. So even as Altman and Amodei call for a slowdown, Zuckerberg, behind in the race to build AGI, is compelled to ignore them. They are not in control of their destiny, and they are not in control of ours. We are all already governed by an algorithm: M -> C -> M1, the drive to make profit, and it has never been aligned with human need.

Socialists have long rallied against this basic misalignment between the way that our technology is created, deployed, and managed and our collective interests. We are not driven by the concerns of exchange value, competitive advantage, and profit. We want what we make to have use value that improves our lives.

I contend that AI does have potential use value. But at this point, it is not a neutral technology; it was developed to align with capitalists’ needs to increase the exploitation of labor and nature. To sell their tech to us, the tech oligarchs have tried to emphasize its more human-aligned capabilities.

Amodei frequently tells the story of his father dying shortly before a cure for his Hepatitis C was found, and how AI will help us cure many diseases and save many lives. I would like to believe him, but his and others’ intentions are undermined by their own actions. As Sam Altman made clear in that now infamous interview with Bloomberg, they value such breakthroughs as profit-making opportunities. For them, entrepreneurship is more important than curing cancer for Altman. That capitalist fact is the root of the alignment problem.

Yes, we need to reliably control or constrain the actions taken by AI models. We should not dismiss these concerns as simply ‘criti-hype,’ but I don’t think the current incentive model of capitalist competition will let us do this reliably. They do not control capitalism; its mute compulsion to compete for profit controls them.

The question is not just whether AI has a 10 percent chance of killing us all in the next decade; it is what our chance is of bringing our lives under democratic control in the next decade. We do want technology that helps us find cures for cancer, but it must be done on our terms and through our democratic control. That is our alignment.

The only way we get there is through collective struggle for international socialism. That might sound like a predictably grandiose ending, but we are not the only ones claiming utopian futures are possible; Elon Musk thinks we won’t need money in ten years. Inshallah—then we won’t have any use for trillionaires either!

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: David S. Soriano; modified by Tempest.