When the RCP was talking to McGill students the first week of school, A.I. kept coming up over and over. Many students expressed how scared they were that there won’t be any jobs for them after they graduate, not to mention the problems it’s causing for the economy and environment.
There was one student who saw the “Overthrow the tech bros” headline on one of our recent papers and came rushing over. She had just moved here from San Francisco. She showed me a picture of a billboard that had been put all over the city. It was an ad for an AI program called “Ava” that read “Stop Hiring Humans”.
I looked into it, and the company that put them up (Artisan) wrote a full article defending their decision.
They claim that the intention of the billboard was to get companies to hire more people. That by making people more productive, companies will have more resources to hire even more employees.
They claim that by “stop hiring humans”, they meant stop hiring humans to do menial labour that AI can do instead.
This is an obvious farce in the face of public backlash, but there is a truth to this.
AI is making work easier by automating tasks. The problem is that when people have less tasks, less of them are needed. Or in the case of Artisan’s employees, they are free to focus on “more fulfilling” work, like cold calling.
All these AI companies love to wax poetic about how one day, this technology will give us reduced work weeks and universal income, but this can’t happen so long as it’s used on a capitalist basis. The only way these dreams can be achieved is by cutting profit out of the equation.
– Naomi G., Montreal
