Joanne McNeil on AI: "Wrong Way" (March 6th @ 12pm SLT)
Joanne's debut novel about relentless worker exploitation in the age of AI is very much to my anti-capitalist's liking!
Sorry folks, full disclosure: I am a Commie who read Marx and therefore my advice is as follows: if a tech bro gazillionaire tells you his one goal is to free you, the wage worker, from the machine, it is probably a lie.
Because newsflash: just like 150+ years ago, if you don’t own the means of production in our current economic system, you will have to sell your labor - under its value - to someone else.
And that labor most likely involves you working in a hierarchy below one or multiple machines or machine-like reps from the PMC.
Period!
In Joanne McNeil's (
) “Wrong Way”, the fictional mega monopoly AllOver brands itself as totally pro worker, completely pro environment, of course pro leveling the playing field, and promises that with the help of AI the proletariat will finally be freed from its chains …Their cray-cray founder Falconer Guidry says things like “anti-trust is pro-capitalism”, which he rejects, because he is - just like Jesus before him perhaps?- concerned with the well-being of absolutely everyone on the planet and therefore needs to be permitted to deliver his goodness unshackled from regulation and no bureaucratic oversight (he hates both communism AND capitalism and is pursuing the only RIGHT way forward, as described in his bestseller “Holistic Apex”)
The reader senses from the start that the main protagonist, 48-year Boston area gig worker Teresa, will probably be getting - again, as with her previous jobs - the short end of a very thorny stick, and without giving away the premise of AllOver’s self-driving car scam, I will confirm that this indeed happens!
But will she fight back? How did she even got into this predicament of non-stable life/work balance? Is it her own fault, did she not grind hard enough? Will workers prevail in this near future scenario?
Workers did not win in Ernst Toller’s “The Machine Wreckers” from 1923, a fascinating play about the weavers around Ned Lud and his Luddites, following one young worker’s fight against ruthless factory owners AND scheming opportunistic colleagues (today Catherine Liu would probably call them “aspiring PMC”).
But I digress! Big round of applause for Joanne who came from the world of journalism (she wrote the excellent non-fiction book “Lurking” where she laid out the history of social media in fascinating detail) to the world that I deem of utmost importance, especially when times are turbulent and folks tend to scroll doomily into the night: the world of literature!
“Wrong Way” is an important book - as of this writing, I am around page 170 - and I’m looking forward to discussing platform/chokepoint/surveillance/late-stage/financial/whatev capitalism (or as we call it at Drax HQ: capitalism!) with the author as pictured above in avatar form.
Joanne is focusing on the aspect of labor within the AI paradigm, and perhaps her novel will be an inspiration for other writers because contemporary SciFi (adjacent?) lit needs to tackle this combination of subjects much more often: tell a AI centric story through the lens of political economy, through the eyes of a modern worker bee.
I mean, I can’t be rereading Philip K. Dick until the end of time or can I?
Frankly I could …
And the labor angle is not more or less important than the issue of using AI for predictive policing (“Resisting AI” is fab non-fiction book on that subject, see below) …
… and of course AI usage in art and culture is a huge problem too, albeit intertwined with the superstructure: in a world where we are so alienated already from one another, through exploitative labor conditions, artistic expression irrespective of economic gain - in whatever form that takes: painting, music, virtual world building, even cooking for us and others communally - is a vital activity.
It keeps us in touch with our humanity.
If we “outsource” art making to the machine as we have done with everything else because of our productivity fetish, boy, it does not bode well for our future as a species…
Art can display empathy for others and it can evoke empathy in others as they engage with this art. We can connect us deeply with the self, and with those we are separated from in time and space.
The ultimate empathy machine is not virtual reality (sorry dear Nonny de la Peña, yes, I did believe this once myself, I admit!), but giving yourself over to a creative task for a while, and doing this without expectation of getting rich or even receiving praise.
Anyways: let’s keep these thoughts for March 6th, 12pm SLT, on the SL Book Club archipelago (exact place tbd!) and discuss them with Joanne.
Also: if you have stories about bad job experiences, about getting fired, about quitting, quietly or loudly and with real nice rage: please bring them! I want a lot of audience participation this time (and going forward, maybe even in SL voice!).
We will be sharing the bad, the worse, the ugly, yes, the whole painful hilarity of modern precarious working lives!
And we won’t feed any existing or theoretical SL AI with these stories either so it trains our own replacement avatars, I promise!
See you in-world!
PS: when I asked one of them free AI image generators to send me some visuals for the prompt “Joanne McNeil reading a/her book” = this is what came out ….you be the judge 👇
oh did i mention racial bias in AI? Not in Joanne's novel as much as in the "Resisting AI" book linked above. And also this just in https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-openai-gpt-hiring-racial-discrimination/