The Labor of Labor

I think I know my next book.

It’s Labor Day weekend, so maybe we should talk about work.

Labor Day was born out of activism during the Industrial Revolution when large groups of people were massed together working for the capitalists and some folks realized that they better organize people as part of a movement before they were literally worked to death while a small handful of owners of the means of production benefitted.

Many fewer Americans (on a percentage basis) work in industry today, but the capitalists have managed to make a machine that has sucked up nearly the entire corpus of human expression (without permission or compensation) that they are now trying to sell back to us as “intelligence” while driving up our electric bills, draining our reservoirs and atrophying our brains.

LLM Chatbots are also racking up a real body count - suicide, murder, psychosis…

Over time, Labor Day become just another long weekend, this one designating the end of summer. The Saturday morning Today Show coverage is about air travel, gas prices and sales on sheets and mattresses. The idea that Labor Day has any kind of meaning is absent.

My memory as a kid was that school didn’t start until after Labor Day, but it seems like just about everyone goes back before the holiday, maybe because people believe kids need more time in class in order to become better laborers.

It’s a bad time for labor, perhaps the worst since the movement’s founding. At his indispensable newsletter, Hamilton Nolan talks about the “three crises of labor,” and how the rights of people who work for a wage - which is the vast majority of us, whether or not we are part of a union - are being threatened by a broad, authoritarian/oligarchic movement.

At the conclusion of his post on these crises, Nolan makes a call for organizing to “spread far beyond the walls of one employer, and out into society at large.” His final call to arms is bracing, but I think necessary, particularly for those of us who have been traditionally comforted and been made comfortable by the structures of society because as far as wage earning goes, we do pretty well.

Fuck that guy [Trump], fuck his judges, fuck his soldiers, fuck his cops, fuck his billionaires, fuck anybody talking about how “the Republican Party is the party of the working class now.” Fuck the Democratic Party leadership, too. You are failing. We have eyes. Everything is getting worse and nobody is coming to save us. We are the workers and the workers are the unions and the unions are for everybody. That’s how the labor movement needs to think now, from the bottom to the top. “Organize or die” has always been true. It’s just that now, the “die” part is getting closer than you would like.

When people ask how we are going to stop authoritarianism, it’s this.

You should also read Nolan’s book, The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor, and you can check out an interview I did with him about the state of organizing in higher education at Academic Freedom on the Line, the newsletter for the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.

A recent story in the New York Times explored the phenomenon of AI “deskilling,” where doctors used a detection tool to flag precancerous growths detected during colonoscopies.

Multiple studies have shown that these tools can help identify growths that humans alone might miss. But this study went one step further doctors who had previously used the tool went back to working without it. After three months of using the AI tool, doctors now working solo saw their detection rate drop significantly below the previously established baseline.

Their abilities had literally eroded.

None of this is unexpected. I have a section on the risks of deskilling in More Than Words. When you outsource a skill to automation, that skill will diminish. The biggest danger for students using this technology as they’re in key stages of development is that they will never actually learn the skills we’re trying to teach in the first place.

One of the hidden dangers the study revealed is that the doctors themselves could not perceive any change in their abilities. The differences could only be detected by looking at thousands of scans in aggregate.

The reality, though, is that deskilling isn’t just about the loss of discrete skills. Skills are just one part of what I call a “practice,” which also includes knowledge, attitudes, and habits-of-mind.

These four different dimensions of the practice are in constant interaction. Good habits-of-mind and attitudes enhance the deployment of skills. Knowledge feeds the development of habits-of-mind and attitudes. And so on and so on.

Becoming someone whose job it is to evaluate issues flagged by an AI when previously you were someone who did the entire task will alter your attitudes, narrow your knowledge, and reshape your habits-of-mind. You will become worse at your job.

The strong AI boosters claim that this deskilling in some areas will somehow result in upskilling overall, but this is transparently not the case. Sure, you may complete more scans, but you are not improving your skills in the process. It’s very much the opposite. Anyone who claims they want to help you use AI to do your job “better” is lying (possibly to themselves, definitely to you). In truth, they are looking for parts of your job that can be automated. That isn’t you doing your job better; that’s you doing less of your job.

How has it historically worked out for laborers when they do less of their job?

I understand the enthusiasm of capitalists for this process, but it is baffling as to why some laborers have bought into this lie. The end game is to either put you out of your work or alter the work in such a way that a human is no longer necessary. Even if your job isn’t eliminated entirely, it will be altered in ways that distort your practice. The teacher who can “handle” more students thanks to their AI assistant has a different job than the teacher who gets to work closely with their individual students person-to-person.

The consistently shocking and enervating thing to me is how little thought goes into deep, comprehensive thinking about how we become truly capable of not just doing our labor, but also being good at our labor, and as a byproduct of that, finding some fulfillment and meaning in our labor.

This is what I want to write about for my next book because I don’t think the embrace of AI is merely a threat to our skills; I think it’s a threat to our souls.

I sometimes hear from people that they have a great idea for a book, but don’t want to tell anyone because they’re worried that it will get stolen. I tell them that they shouldn’t worry, because ideas by themselves don’t mean that much, that a book can only be brought to life through the intersection of idea and writer, so even if someone else takes their idea, they won’t be able to write the same book.

Maybe I’m being naive, but I don’t think so. No one could write what I’ve written because it’s mine, so I don’t mind describing the book I’d like to write. Even if someone else runs with the idea, they won’t be stealing my book.

When I’m being glib about how I see the book I want to write next, I describe it as a cross between Studs Terkel’s Working, and Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day?

How great is this?

I want to write a book about how we become what we are and how that shapes our identities and lives (Working), and how our working lives are inextricably woven together to create community, as with the population of Richard Scarry’s Busytown.

I want to understand how I could go from a state of pure incompetence as a writing teacher in the Fall of 1994 as a graduate student at McNeese State University, armed with only a textbook and grade book, facing down 35 developmental writing students who needed to pass the class to continue their college careers, to now making much of my living thinking, writing, and speaking about teaching writing.

But it’s not just the story of a building of competence, a “practice” as I speak of above. It’s about becoming a person with a life, with interests, with meaning. It’s also the story of doing this work inside structures which have often not valued the labor in ways consistent to the importance we supposedly place upon it.

In a properly functioning system I’d still be a writing teacher, but I never had a job that paid more than $36,000 a year to do it.

I’m lucky to have arrived in this place where my work is fulfilling, where it is (fingers crossed) economically sustainable, particularly as I had no map or plan to get here, and wasn’t even wholly aware this destination existed to begin with.

I am concerned we are making a world where younger people are not going to have even a shred of a chance at traversing this kind of journey because it will have been decided by others that we no longer have to give the young people access to the tools with which they can make themselves into who they wish to be.

Consider one Victor Riparbelli, who we are told is a “technologist” as though this is something you can actually be. As reported by NPR, Riparbelli, “predicts a future where students interact with AI avatars rather than read and write.” According to Riparbelli, "I think we're at the dawn of a new era of AI-enabled communication. And one day, I think we'll look back at reading and writing as historical artifacts, like we do with papyrus scrolls or hieroglyphs or cave paintings."

Riparbelli is the CEO of a company worth $2 billion that creates AI avatars used in ads, training, and schools. As reported by NPR, “Riparbelli says that humans learn better by watching videos and listening to audio, rather than by reading text. He pointed to people opting to watch tutorials on YouTube or listen to a podcast rather than reading. And as AI gets more advanced, he says, video content will become easier to produce at scale.”

Let us be clear, and also fair about what Mr. Riparbelli is.

He is an idiot, and also a cretin.

Maybe that’s not fair. Let’s look at the rest of his vision.

Eventually, Riparbelli says, this means that schools will be able to use these avatars to supplement teachers' lessons — like having a personal tutor for each student. Rather than children reading from a textbook, for example, he imagines every student talking to their own AI avatar about a given lesson. That avatar would then assess how well the student comprehended the material and would share that with the teacher. "It's really like sitting down with a teacher that has infinite time and responds immediately to you," Riparbelli says. "I think that is just absolutely magical."

Nope. Idiot and cretin is right. An idiot and cretin with a $2 billion company and a Ted Talk whose ideas are highlighted on NPR.

I don’t know how to defeat this. What Riparbelli describes should cause mass revulsion and yet it is not only being taken seriously, in some quarters it is viewed as desirable.

The only thing I know to do in response is tell a different story, so that’s what I’m going to keep trying to do. I don’t actually know if I’ll write this book I have in mind. I’m compiling a list of things I should read, people who I should talk to, possibly interesting professions it would be interesting to explore, but there is no proposal, no contract, no words. The first step is believing it needs to exist.

I think I’m taking that step.

Links

At the Chicago Tribune I wrote about Fresh Air host Terry Gross’s amazing and horrifying method for reading books. If you haven’t seen the video of how she goes about her preparation for an interview with an author, you must.

At Inside Higher Ed I explored how a fascist push may take many things from us, but one thing they can’t have is your dignity, unless you turn it over willingly.

At his newsletter, The Melt by Jason Diamond , Jason Diamond maps out a “Chicago literary canon.”

Some interesting insight from Sean deLone on “publishing economics.”

Looking for something that’s off the mainstream radar? The Mid Theory Collective has some recommendations for “Women in Translation Month.”

This cheered me up, “I am an AI Hater” by Anthony Moser.

I have yet to have a week where my friends McSweeney's don’t have something appropriate to my subject to share. This week it’s “Updated Syllabus, Revised After What Happened Last Summer,” by Tyler Gooch.

Recommendations

1. More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner
2. Trust by Hernan Diaz
3. James by Percival Everett
4. The Lost City of Z by David Grann
5. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Dave M. - Philadelphia, PA

Here’s a weird little book that I’m hoping will keep Dave invested for the relatively short time it’ll take to read it, Grown Ups by Marie Aubert.

You know what a nice act of resistance this Labor Day weekend would be? Not working, and reading a book entirely for your own pleasure.

See you next week.

JW
The Biblioracle