tech-industry

I’m a science fiction writer, which means that my job is to make up futuristic parables about our current techno-social arrangements to interrogate not just what a gadget does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to

And obviously, a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.

“There is no alternative” is a cheap rhetorical slight. It’s a demand dressed up as an observation. “There is no alternative” means “STOP TRYING TO THINK OF AN ALTERNATIVE.” Which, you know, fuck that.

The promise of AI — the promise AI companies make to investors — is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company.

“And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop.’ It’s their signature on the diagnosis.”

This is a reverse centaur, and it’s a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it’s what Dan Davies calles an “accountability sink.” The radiologist’s job isn’t really to oversee the AI’s work, it’s to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes.

And one of the reasons the AI companies are so anxious to fire coders is that coders are the princes of labor. They’re the most consistently privileged, sought-after, and well-compensated workers in the labor force.

Let me explain: on average, illustrators don’t make any money. They are already one of the most immiserated, precartized groups of workers out there. They suffer from a pathology called “vocational awe.” That’s a term coined by the librarian Fobazi Ettarh, and it refers to workers who are vulnerable to workplace exploitation because they actually care about their jobs — nurses, librarians, teachers, and artists.

And in the meantime, it’s bad art. It’s bad art in the sense of being “eerie,” the word Mark Fisher uses to describe “when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something.”

AI art is eerie because it seems like there is an intender and an intention behind every word and every pixel, because we have a lifetime of experience that tells us that paintings have painters, and writing has writers. But it’s missing something. It has nothing to say, or whatever it has to say is so diluted that it’s undetectable.

So what is the alternative? A lot of artists and their allies think they have an answer: they say we should extend copyright to cover the activities associated with training a model. And I’m here to tell you they are wrong:w rong because this would inflict terrible collateral damage on socially beneficial activities, and it would represent a massive expansion of copyright over activities that are currently permitted — for good reason!.

And today, the media industry is larger and more profitable than it has ever been, and also: the share of media industry income that goes to creative workers is lower than its ever been, both in real terms, and as a proportion of those incredible gains made by creators’ bosses at the media company.

So how it is that we have given all these new rights to creators, and those new rights have generated untold billions, and left creators poorer? It’s because in a creative market dominated by five publishers, four studios, three labels, two mobile app stores, and a single company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks, giving a creative worker extra rights to bargain with is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money.

This is the guy who signed that press release in my inbox. And his message was: The problem isn’t that Midjourney wants to train a Gen AI model on copyrighted works, and then use that model to put artists on the breadline. The problem is that Midjourney didn’t pay RIAA members Universal and Disney for permission to train a model. Because if only Midjourney had given Disney and Universal several million dollars for training right to their catalogs, the companies would have happily allowed them to train to their heart’s content, and they would have bought the resulting models, and fired as many creative professionals as they could.

When Getty Images sues AI companies, it’s not representing the interests of photographers. Getty hates paying photographers! Getty just wants to get paid for the training run, and they want the resulting AI model to have guardrails, so it will refuse to create images that compete with Getty’s images for anyone except Getty. But Getty will absolutely use its models to bankrupt as many photographers as it possibly can.

All through this AI bubble, the Copyright Office has maintained — correctly — that AI-generated works cannot be copyrighted, because copyright is exclusively for humans.

We can do it ourselves, the way the writers did in their historic writers’ strike. The writers brought the studios to their knees. They did it because they are organized and solidaristic, but also are allowed to do something that virtually no other workers are allowed to do: they can engage in “sectoral bargaining,” whereby all the workers in a sector can negotiate a contract with every employer in the sector.

The AI Safety people say they are worried that AI is going to end the world, but AI bosses love these weirdos. Because on the one hand, if AI is powerful enough to destroy the world, think of how much money it can make!

If capitalism is supposed to be efficient and, guided by the invisible hand of the market, eliminate inefficiencies, how is it that the tech industry, the purported cradle of innovation, has become a redoubt of waste and unproductivity?

The compulsion to launch new projects in order to scale the corporate ladder has become so ubiquitous that employees call it the LPA cycle: launch, promo, abandon.

As one Google employee posted on Hacker News: “You cannot get promoted beyond a certain level in this place unless you ‘launch’ something big. So what do you get when you add all of these perverse incentives? Nine thousand, eight hundred and eighty-three chat apps.”

As a result, management is forced into a vicious cycle of upselling their team’s importance in order to be allocated a higher headcount, meaning they then have to come up with new projects to justify the new headcount. The more workers there are, the more important the work must be, and the more important the work is, the more people must work on it.

This model of innovation is also the reason Google employs more people than it needs, according to the employee, who added that because the company may never “strike it lucky [again] . . . they have to settle for attempting to starve potential competition of talent.”

Where industrial firms extract profits from the gap between value produced and what workers get paid in wages, internet platforms rely foremost on rents, which generate profit on the basis of existing property, intellectual or otherwise.

However, if in aggregate, profits are generated through extractive practices that do not require the labor force these companies have built up, what leverage do these workers have? The obvious answer is that they can withhold future profits by halting the creation of new products and revenue streams. But even this won’t work if the projects they work on are bullshit.

We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information.

The file, which was linked to from a public page on Xandr’s website, contains 650,000 rows of data, each containing the name of an audience segment, the name of the supplier of the data behind that segment, a supplier ID number, and a segment ID number.

They also sometimes contain a hierarchical taxonomy, such as “Lifestyle > Visitation > Recent Retail Visit by Shopper > Lululemon.”

In the 1990s Liemandt was the golden boy of enterprise software

Others say Crossover is running the cloud equivalent of a software sweatshop.

Disgruntled employees be damned—the pool of skilled workers in emerging countries appears to be bottomless.