A rare piece of good news made the headlines recently. Thanks to artificial intelligence, researchers have been able to develop antibiotics that can kill exotic superbugs that have been unresponsive to all existing antibacterials. AI-driven algorithms mapped thousands of compounds in key proteins. Acinetobacter baumanniithe bacterium that causes pneumonia and infects wounds is so serious that the World Health Organization classified it as one of the three “critical threats” to humanity.
Once the mapping was completed, AI began inventing effective drugs with new characteristics compared to existing antibiotics. Without the help of AI, life-saving antibiotics will remain a pipe dream. It was a triumph of science over the years.
But there’s a nasty flip side. Remember Chris Smalls from Amazon.com.
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The warehouse workers who organized an employee strike from the company’s Staten Island, New York, facility to protest working conditions during the pandemic?
After firing Smalls, it emerged that Amazon’s wealthy and powerful directors had spent hours on conference calls planning to use the assassination to undermine his cause. Mr. Smalls’ fame was short-lived. Yet a few years later, Smalls successfully organized the first (and still the only) formally recognized Amazon workers’ union in the United States. Today, that success is jeopardized by the same AI technology that produced antibiotics that destroy bacteria.
The Smalls union is a painful setback for Amazon executives who have been trained for years to use any means, fair or unjust, to discourage workers from unionizing. A training video leaked in 2018 instructed managers to look out for red flags in organizing efforts. Workers were encouraged to use surveillance cameras outside Amazon’s warehouses to spot employees who might be staying after work and trying to persuade their colleagues to join the union. They were also encouraged to eavesdrop on employee conversations and hear phrases like “living wage” and “exhausted.”
Soon after, software replaced the boss’s rudimentary monitoring methods, or at least helped them with it. In 2020, Recode reported that Amazon purchased a Geospatial Operating Console (SPOC) to monitor workers prone to union engagement. Vice also exposed how Amazon’s HR department monitors employee list servers and Facebook groups to predict work slowdowns, strikes, and other collective actions.
The software classified workers based on whether their characteristics and behavior correlated with their pro-union tendencies. But the software’s predictive power disappointed Amazon, so the company continued to rely on local managers to monitor employees the old-fashioned way.
All of that is now overshadowed by AI. Why keep your employees on the lookout, or keep an eye on employee posts and actions when a centralized AI can automatically detect pro-union phrases and behaviors in all Amazon warehouses in real-time, at zero cost? Do I need to buy software or something to read Facebook pages?
Surprisingly, the union-busting AI relies on the very same scientific breakthroughs that produced the germ-busting AI. Before the advent of AI, researchers classified molecules as vectors that either contained or did not contain certain groups of chemicals. This was no different, and no more efficient than his Amazon’s Her SPOC software, which classifies employees based on their perception of wanting to unionize.
In contrast, AI bacteria-removal programs rely on neural networks and machine learning models that can explore chemical spaces that would take decades for human researchers to explore. They are then trained to analyze the molecular structure of bacterial proteins and identify compounds that are likely to kill bacteria.
AI union busting programs rely on the same process. The only difference is that the AI explores warehouse space and focuses on employees instead of chemical space and molecules. Employee real-time data is constantly uploaded to the program by electronic devices that employees must carry wherever they go in the workplace, even to the restroom. .
These AI-driven systems learn how to devise strategies to neutralize programmed targets, whether it’s a bundle of proteins in the heart of a bacterium or a group of workers in the break room. In both cases, AI is used to classify targets into vectors and then maximize the probability of eliminating them.
It was inevitable. Humanity has proven talented enough to develop AI algorithms that can fully decipher killer bug proteins and create effective antibiotics without human input. Any doubt that a conglomerate like Amazon would use this opportunity to identify and downsize workplaces in its own supply chains where AI predicts a high likelihood of unionization?
See also “Workers are not indentured servants,” Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson disputed the union’s liability for the strike.
Economists seriously profess that the forces of supply and demand are at work and that technological change benefits us all. This fiction allows them to turn a blind eye to the vicious class struggles going on before them, and to allow the macroeconomy (at least in the absence of intolerable levels of debt) to overpower the commodities that technology can produce. Unable to generate sufficient demand, it is destroying the livelihoods of millions. .
Warren Buffett, whose success largely stems from ignoring the illusions of economists, no doubt famously quipped that the class war is real and that his classes are winning. That was before algorithm-driven digital devices replaced shop floor foremen, dictating the pace of work and full surveillance that made Charlie Chaplin’s Modern His Times factory look like a worker’s paradise. bottom.
As if that wasn’t enough, AI is now empowering conglomerates to obliterate trade unions, the only institutions that can give workers little power in a world with few workers. .
The class war, as Buffett has acknowledged, will soon pit AI-powered, cloud-based capital in all sectors against a lose-and-lose global precariat. Whatever the politics and aspirations, it should be clear that this economy is unspeakable and unsustainable.
Former Greek Finance Minister Iannis Varoufakis is the leader of the MeRA25 party and professor of economics at the University of Athens.
This commentary is published with permission Project Syndicate — New AI germ buster can also crush unions
more: Amazon fires union organizer at Alabama warehouse, union says
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