Artificial Intelligence AI
Augmented Exploitation: Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Work and Changes in the Labor Process
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsIn the Introduction to Augmented Exploitation, co-editors Phoebe Moore and Jamie Woodcock point up two main problems with how automation and artificial intelligence are being discussed as the end of the first quarter of the 21st century draws near. Number one is the claim that Al is changing the labor process in new and unprecedented ways. But capitalists have always introduced machines in order to increase the amount of what each worker can produce in a given period of time. This is where the second problem comes in—either a certain process will be automated, or it will not—a binary that focuses on machines and not on the workers who operate them. Rather than the prospects of automation and interpretive learning replacing workers, we need rather to see that these are augmentations of the labor process. Also discussed will be two of the many vital essays from this year's Socialist Register—Beyond Digital Capitalism: New Ways of Living.
The Warehouse: Workers and Robots at Amazon with Alessandro Delfanti
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants“Delfanti has done here what more critics of Amazon should — listen carefully to the people whose work makes the corporation function. Those of us fighting for a better future than Amazon's dystopia have much to learn from this book”. — Dania Rajendra, Inaugural Director, Athena Coalition
Worn Out: Retail Workers vs. Digital Surveillance
Recording available on YouTubeBeneath the success of fast fashion, a grimmer story is told by Madison Van Oort in Worn Out: How Retailers Surveil and Exploit Workers in the Digital Age and How Workers Are Fighting Back. Going undercover in two of the world's largest fast fashion stores in New York City, she observed firsthand how data and surveillance shape the lives of the people who do the actual producing and selling.
Reading Science Fiction Politically – Spring 2024 Season
The Science and Visionary Fiction reading group meets weekly to read and discuss science, visionary and speculative fiction that bears on politics, the environment, and the struggle for a better future for all. We focus on the concept of visionary fiction, emerging from Octavia Butler's writings and beautifully articulated ten years ago by Walidah Imarisha, ... Read more
AI versus Labor: Luddism and Beyond
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants8 weekly sessions starting Oct 1. Is Artificial Intelligence (AI, sic) really the dire threat to the future of humanity as even some of its proponents claim, or is it a more mundane and familiar threat to working people who face loss of their livelihoods and/or further speed-up and alienation? The entire history of industrial capitalism is punctuated by recurring waves of automation to reduce labor costs and turnover time, each time provoking strong resistance by the affected workforce. This reading group will probe the history both of AI and computer technology specifically and of working-class resistance to capitalist automation in general.