What is IR-for-Good?
Published:
(Coming soon.)
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AI as politic of class exploitation
22 minute read
Published:
In the grand debate about AI and its implication for society, a particularly important concern that justifiably receives a lot of attention is the likely impact of AI on workers. A lot has been written about this in recent years informed by ongoing critical work in this space. However, mainstream public discourse often reduces that conversation to “AI automation will kill jobs”. That framing while not incorrect, is too reductive and fails to capture the systemic crisis that may be in front of us. It also has the insidious effect of bolstering a technodeterministic view that imagines a fabled race between “humans vs. machines” at the heart of the issue, with Big Tech and Silicon Valley simply acting out in roles preordained to them rather than being active participants in subverting technological progress towards unprecedented wealth and power accumulation. That framing claims with self-righteous indignation that it should be self-evident that technological progress will increasingly make bigger strides and therefore the machine is inevitably destined to surpass human capabilities at some point, and it is society that must constantly evolve to survive the new realities. What is left to debate then? If you do not agree it must be because YOU are a technophobe, a luddite, anti-progress, and anti-AI. I will reserve my temptation to rage against the tech-bro arrogance that dehumanizes us all by reducing us to “collections of skills of economic value to the capitalist system” for another time. But I do think we should talk about why this view is not just dangerously wrong, but nefarious at its core. It is a deliberate erasure of critical thought and scholarship on this topic to conceal the true reality of mass dispossession of workers, undoing of decades of labor right progress, and a drumming up of neocolonial extractive practices and class exploitation that is unfolding in front of our eyes.
Why I am leaving big tech…
11 minute read
Published:
After spending almost two decades in big tech, I was notified last month that I am being laid off. There have been massive waves of layoffs across the industry recently, and I am just one of the many tens of thousands of tech workers who have been impacted. However, the news marked a moment of much bigger personal change for me as it prompted me to finally gather up enough courage to make a decision that I have been putting off for years. I am leaving big tech.