Yes, AI Is Coming for White-Collar Workers
Will we protect them? Or sell them out the way we've been selling out blue-collar workers for decades?
Folks-
Let me start with a confession: For the last 18 months, every time I’ve seen a story about ChatGPT or generative AI, I’ve felt my left eye start to twitch.
Am I Luddite? Maybe a little. (I still have Boston’s first album on 8-track.) The bigger issue, though, is that for the first time ever I can see a new technology that has me directly in its crosshairs.
I’m a writer, after all, and the fact that there’s now an app that can generate posts, articles, even books is not good news for someone who pays his bills by generating posts, articles, even books. I could argue that ChatGPT is no substitute for a good human writer. I could even argue that writing is one of the most human things we do. No matter. For the writing needs of the masses, I suspect ChatGPT qualifies as good enough. And the technology is only going to get better.
If you make your living in what have traditionally been called white-collar professions — law, finance, marketing, tech, medicine, design — AI will be (or probably already is) disrupting your life as well. Many experts have been trying to cushion the blow by saying that AI will simply augment the work done by people, not replace them; the new technology, they say, will “free people up” to do the kind of work “only humans can do.” That sounds great — until you remember that 18 months ago writing was one of those things only humans could do.
You see my concern.
Blast from the Past
If America’s blue-collar workers are feeling a sense of schadenfreude at all this, well, fair enough. For more than four decades, two forces — automation and an increasing corporate focus on a fat bottom line — led to the elimination of millions of American jobs in manufacturing and other lines of work that previously allowed people with only high school educations to enter the middle class. I wish I could tell you I spent those decades speaking out stridently against what was happening, but the truth is I did what most of us in the professional classes did: Shook my head about the job losses, then said something like, “Well, that’s just the cost of efficiency and progress, I guess. Those folks need to get some retraining.”
Easy to say when you’re not the one being sacrificed at the altar of efficiency, nor the one who’s supposed to get retrained.
I think it’s clear now that the mass elimination of jobs we’ve seen over the last several decades came at a huge cost not only to those laid-off workers and many, many devastated communities, but to the country writ large. It’s no accident that income inequality has surged during this same time period, nor that we now find ourselves dealing with massive political instability. People who’ve been silenced tend not to say silent forever.
History Repeating Itself?
So here’s the question: are we about to repeat the same mistake with AI? It’s an issue I explore in a new piece for Politico Magazine — specifically, whether organized labor (whose popularity is at a 60-year high) can play a role in protecting workers from some of the economic downsides of AI.
My story focuses, in particular, on AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler, who wants workers to have “a seat at the table,” as she puts it, when it comes to how AI is developed and rolled out in the workplace. Shuler and her organization certainly don’t want to stop AI dead in its tracks, but they say – correctly, I believe – that workers should be part of the conversation as we figure out what AI can do, how we can use it, and who (if anyone) it will replace.
I’ll confess that I’ve not always been the biggest union supporter. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m from Philly, where unions have long had a rep as being obstacles to progress (not to mention occasionally corrupt, even brutish). But that’s blinded me to an even more important reality: organized labor is the best counterweight we have to corporate greed and overreach.
I smiled last summer when people asked United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain how he could possibly justify his demand for a 40 percent increase in auto worker wages. His response? A 40 percent pay raise is what car company CEOs got over the previous four years. Why should regular workers get less?
The broad point I’m trying to make here is that, with something as profoundly transformative as AI, we need to understand its impact on the country as a whole. The role AI plays in our lives is not a decision that should be left only to Silicon Valley titans, nor to corporate CEOs. It impacts all of us, and we should figure out what works best for the greatest number of people.
As I say in my Politico story:
“Two of the most disruptive events in American life over the past 40 years — deindustrialization and the rise of digital technology — were more or less imposed on the American public without average people having much say in what happened. When it comes to the AI revolution that’s now upon us — a revolution that could be very good or very bad — [we need to] make sure that doesn’t happen again.”