The hype cycle around automation and AI is feverish at the moment and includes all of Amazon robots with a human-like grip to the idea of “robot” lawyers.
But as machines, physical or algorithmic, infiltrate the American workplace, the country’s workers — and the unions that represent them — want to ensure that human interests take precedence over abstract notions of AI-assisted “efficiency.”
Last week at CES I spoke to Amanda Ballantyne, the director of the AFL-CIO’s Technology Institute, who described how the increased focus of recent years on American-made technology and manufacturing has been a beneficial development for employees. But that’s not all labor wants. The largest US unions want to have a say in how new technologies are developed and implemented, with a view to incorporating feedback from the workers who actually have to work alongside their new robot colleagues.
“People developing technology might think in a lab it’s going to work perfectly, but I can give you some examples of where technology has been introduced [into a workplace where] they clearly haven’t consulted with people actually doing the work, and it’s been a quasi, if not complete, disaster,” said D. Taylor, president of the hospitality industry union UNITE HERE.
Taylor pointed to hotel booking software that automated the guest checkout process but messed up the housekeeping process, sending employees to different rooms in a decidedly time-wasting manner. It’s a complaint that winds through the discourse around AI development: The decision-making process around how new technologies are implemented may be more important than the underlying technology itself, a mindset that also helped inform the Biden administration. AI Letter of Rights blueprint.
“There is a range of very deep labor movement issues involved in ensuring that algorithmic management systems actually follow the law, that there is openness, accountability and a voice of the workers in how those systems are implemented,” Ballantyne told me, referring to specifically to the kinds of algorithms not only that doing different jobs, but track workers’ movements, set their hours, and perform various other kinds of bossy tasks.
Given that the basic raison d’être since the labor movement negotiates with bosses, human or not, it makes sense for the industry to push for a say in how these futuristic technologies are deployed. That has led to initiatives like the Technology Institute that Ballantyne leads, which she describes as an effort not to put the reins of technology in the workplace, but to put people-conscious guardrails around it.
“We have good and bad technology,” Ballantyne said. “There’s technology that improves work for working people, and then there’s technology that automates and reduces skills, and if there’s no plan to help workers navigate through that, then we have job losses and inequality.”
Ballantyne pointed to the CHIPS and Science Act passed last year as a big step in the right direction when it comes to building a more employee-centric tech infrastructure, citing its funding for the National Science Center’s workforce-centric organization. fund. Technology, innovation and partnerships directorate.
“This is an opportunity for us to engage real workers in research and development at scale,” Ballantyne said of the program, which will bring both scientists to the workplace and union members to research labs. “The researchers will have access to employees who understand at a grassroots level what’s right and wrong about how technology works, ultimately leading to better technology.”
Almost everyone agrees that the government’s aging digital infrastructure is in urgent need of an overhaul.
On the blog of the conservative American Enterprise Institute yesterday, nonresident senior fellow Jim Harper wrote a sour case that starting point for this effort should be the legislative process itself. Harper, taking offense at a suggestion from a New York Times reporter that the House Conservatives’ demand to spend more time reading and discussing legislation was unreasonable proposes a simple solution: automate (part of) the process, using the XML data that accompanies most legislation to belong.
“XML in congressional legislation can — and sometimes does — identify which existing statutes a bill would amend. It can identify which agencies would affect an invoice. It can articulate references to locations: cities, states, government facilities, national parks, and so on. It can even indicate where accounts are authorizing spending or allocating funds and how much,” Harper writes, arguing for the resurgence of a project he built at the Cato Institute that made that XML more easily accessible to the public.
He quotes former President Barack Obama’s (broken) campaign promise wait five days before signing a bill to give the public time to review it, present the project as a bipartisan one, albeit acknowledging Congress’s decidedly partisan tone: which actually works in line with Democratic ideals. That would be good, even if the authors of the reform are, in the eyes of some, hideous and stupid.”
The company responsible for the popular Bored monkey NFTs may soon face some uncomfortable questions in court.
A bit of crucial context for a weird, ongoing saga: For more than a year now, provocateur and conceptual artist Ryder Ripps has been accusing Bored Ape creators Yuga Labs of deliberately embedding Nazi rhetoric and images in their art. That, along with his own line of art parodying Yuga Labs, earned him a lawsuit from the company for false advertising and copyright infringement.
In a somewhat ironic turn of events, however, Ripps’ lawyers will now have the opportunity to impeach the founders of Yuga Labs on those allegations – after a judge on Monday rejected the company’s motion to immunize them against that deposit. Those founders, who called Ripps a “demented troll” in a June Medium message responding to the “insanely far-fetched” accusations of racism, will now have to put their denial on the legal register for better or worse.
Stay in touch with the whole team: Ben Schrekinger ([email protected]); Dirk Robertson ([email protected]); Steve Heuser ([email protected]); and Benton Ives ([email protected]). follow us @DigitalFuture on Twitter.
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