Every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of others, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. Albert Einstein
We are being “saved” from work, then for what? Wendell Berry
If you care about farmers, let the potatoes stay home. Barbara Kingsolver
Writing is a labor of love and also an act of defiance, a way to light a candle in a gale wind. Alice Childress
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. Dwight D. Eisenhower
Thou, of God, dost sell us all good things at the price of labor. Leonardo da Vinci
Those of you who have followed these posts over the years know of my personal fondness for holidays and other events that call attention to our current “crisis of labor.”
Though not without caveats, Global Action has long supported the call of the UN for “decent work,” a specificity-challenged notion which nevertheless underscores the chronic need for work which allows individuals to have dignity, families to have security, and communities which have at the very least the prospect of greater prosperity.
It also calls attention to that which undermines decency, including radical and growing economic inequalities, oligarchies which have much, control much, and have secured the means to ensure that acquisition, predation and control are unassailable features of our current economic landscape. It even calls attention to labor issues specifically affecting immigrants, such as those farmers who thought they were being clever by subscribing to the MAGA brand and sending away migrant workers to return home or otherwise be deported by ICE, farmers who now cannot attract enough workers to harvest crops while their fearless leader sells out their ranches to import inferior foreign beef.
I won’t take up your time with too much of this, but a few images have consumed a good bit of my conscious life over this last period, all of which have implications for the incessant and even desperate scramble which is modern labor.
The first takes the form of the proliferation of data centers, critical for artificial intelligence but also for surveillance technologies which seem to incarnate the most dystopian features of our increasingly “big brother” world. Like prisons, slaughterhouses and other entities we would prefer to keep out of public view, these data centers are generally placed in communities far from the mainstream, certainly far from the domiciles of the billionaire classes, communities which have in many instances stated their preference for data centers to be placed elsewhere, or nowhere at all.
My feeds have been full of images from “town halls” in mostly rural areas where the decision to host these data centers appear to have been made in advance and where those who protest the loudest are not heeded but aggressively removed from the premises. It isn’t clear what the decision makers receive for their acquiescence to these large corporate interests, and in a few instances there apparently have been some local economic benefits at least in the short term. But for others across the political spectrum, the often-vague promise of employment has given way to water shortages, higher energy costs, and the constant whirring sounds of “progress” which are much more likely to ruin sleep than pay down mortgages.
As the US president has intoned, these data centers are here to stay (as long as he is here to stay at least) and there really isn’t anything the rest of us can do about it. They are “here to stay” despite vociferous bipartisan protests against the technology which is now being sold to us in a format making it clear that, as with other “advances,” we have essentially no choice but to buy.
Government officials apparently have little interest in regulating AI and its clear and present dangers, aside from ensuring that stock portfolios are fully loaded with the investments which their AI corporate friends largely control. The UN has sincere interest in governance though its tendency is to attempt to govern matters such as AI which are accelerating far faster than they can be regulated.
To claim that AI is being “oversold” is likely a significant understatement. Everywhere the media is filled with smiling faces who have apparently figured out how to use AI to solve problems which have ostensibly eluded the human race since its inception. I will spare you here a recitation of the state of AI “governance” and its many loopholes. Suffice to say that one of the prevalent concerns is the relationship of AI to employment, specifically the promise that AI will make much of the work we now do irrelevant, that it will do what humans now do in a faster and more cost-effective manner and help the clever manipulators of this technology to keep their own “ competitive edge.”
To say that AI has created some strange bedfellows would be to understate the extent to which AI has enabled reshuffled kingdoms and even motivated the new class of “kings” to embrace ideas more in keeping with their political adversaries. Such is the case with Elon Musk who has publicly backed a compensatory proposal for Universal Basic Income, a concept pushed responsibly by a few of our colleagues as a way of building an economic “floor” under people which would free them from fiscal distress and allow them to pursue interests and activities which are unlikely for people raising a child or two while working the third shift at Arby’s.
But there are two significant “rubs” here, the first being UBI would be seen by the ruling political class as an entitlement, a compensation in effect for the technologies that promise to render much of what we are now paid to do to some employment junkyard. Still the backlash here could well be considerable given that said ruling class is attempting to apply the same entitlement label to (and then dismantle) the Social Security that most of us have worked our entire lives to ensure. If Social Security can be dismissed as “entitlement” by some political elites the battle over any UBI proposal is likely to be intense.
But even this pales alongside the concerns expressed by the late Wendell Berry and others, that technology which “saves” us from work “saves” us to do what exactly? UBI or no, how are we to fill our days with meaning and value in the absence of discipline which work confers? How are we to compensate for the loss of identity and dignity which work also and often confers?
There have been of late a spate of articles chronicling the travails of “retirement” in my country and many of these highlight the degree to which we collectively seem not “to know what to do with ourselves.” For many people I know, performing services to corporations or communities absent compensation runs counter to generational work priorities. So, then, what? How do we build a life that honors our skills and passions while opening portals for the development of new ones? How do we locate and operationalize the callings which can get us off our couches and into community spaces where there are so many gaps to fill – gaps of resources but also of companionship and revitalization which could call out the best in us and help us to be better still?
AI may well eventually render our labors obsolete. But it cannot easily help us rebalance lives which are often primarily focused on monetized labor. As many already recognize, we need also to build spaces for active service and engagement within and beyond our families such that those spaces will welcome us after the labor we thought might never end, actually ends.
This is not about killing time but about the emancipation of skills and values which people need to share and from which others need to benefit. While we labor, we can also make time for feeding and caregiving, for faith and emotional support, for environmental care and biodiversity health, for children and elders not our own, for civic spaces in desperate need of revitalization, for farmers and artists seeking local outlets. Investments in one or more of these areas, however modest, can identify attributes in ourselves which will serve us well when we come upon those days when “knowing what to do with ourselves” becomes a matter of more urgent personal concern.
The options are numerous. The gaps are daunting. The needs are vast. In the age of AI and its datacenter enablers, for all the threats and promises they represent to labor as we still know it, community investments are important to our own well-being and to all those with whom we might interact. Our societies are currently in a world of hurt, but we can identify and practice skills and passions over a lifetime to help ensure that it hurts a little less.
gapwblog 
Leave a comment