Chaos, calamity and AI

(First published on Fin24)

he past week has thrown into sharp relief the impact that the rapid advance of artificial intelligence (AI) is having — and will potentially have — on all our lives, now and into the future. But it does seem almost ironic that this fact has reached global attention because of the strike by thousands of Hollywood actors.

However, that strike followed an ongoing 75-day stoppage by the writers of tinseltown. And their action was one of a number of labour actions along with numerous smaller incidents on the labour front in several countries in recent months that could be traced back to this potential apogee of the fourth industrial revolution.

Architects in the United States and Britain, reduced. by CAD-CAM and other developments to being not much more than building regulation and construction supervisors, have started to join unions. Accountants and a range of other “professionals” are also discovering that their status as a “middle class” above workers is a myth.

So for all the talk over the past week about pay rates, “residuals”, streaming fees and contracts, the underlying question comes down to the use, control and ownership of machines that, at one level, hold out the threat of making most of wage labour redundant. On the other, the potential of AI as it develops, could be to free humanity from drudgery and the destructive anarchy of competitive market-based economics.

This raises a fundamental question that has been with us since the advent of modern industrial society: should developments that affect us all be marshalled for the public good or be left to be exploited by private greed, let alone gain?

By and large, even in grossly unequal societies such as ours in South Africa, private gain has been able to co-exist alongside services available for the public good. Blatant greed has also, often to a limited degree, been reined in. But it has been a constant battle that has now perhaps reaching its climax.

What the latest developments have done has been to highlight the fact that our global social and economic system in its various forms, is no longer fit for purpose. As Fran Drescher, president of the Hollywood union, noted when announcing the actor strike: “The business model is broken.”

It is a model that allowed more highly trained, specialist individuals to gravitate to professions — never “trades” — with greater status, higher pay and being accepted as “middle class”. The rapid advance of “thinking machines” is now starting to obliterate the distinction between “worker” and “professional” — and to remove many workers from the equation.

But the business model that developed over the past century and more also affected how trade unions and and political entities developed. They too may be in need of serious regeneration or reform as a growing army of part-time workers emerges from a sea of growing unemployment.

Modern industrial society has.of course, always had precarious workers, most prominently men hiring themselves out for casual work on docks or on constructions sites. But with trade union pressure and the need for greater skills and for stability, permanent employment increased, giving rise to a social class of wage earners, an international proletariat.

But now that largely labouring proletariat, together with engineers, designers, writers, actors, and other sellers of labour in many fields, is increasingly being catapulted by private greed into the “gig” economy of part-time work. The proletariat of recent history is increasingly becoming what could best be termed a precariat.

The ongoing global economic crisis adds to the problem and has seen, for example the reduction of bars on child labour even in certain of the states in the USA. It all adds up to a need for worker unity and for clarity about a democratic way forward.

Yet the example of the apparent unity in Hollywood is something of an exception; fragmentation within a generally weakened labour movement is widespread. This has aided the resurgence of the poison of ethnic and religious nationalisms.

Chaos rather than clarity seems in the offing and South Africa provides a good example. As of this week, there are 214 officially recognised trade unions, with an unknown number facing deregistration for failure to provide, mainly, audited financial statements.

The country’s largest union, the National Union of Metalworkers, while not exactly tearing itself apart, is certainly fraying badly at the edges. Internal documents admit to a large scale loss of membership, officials have been expelled and court cases loom amid allegations of financial impropriety.

Recent protests by the Cosatu and Saftu federations, also failed to rally the masses. Meant as demonstrations of labour dissatisfaction with the government, the hundreds who turned out produced what amounted to a whimper rather than a warning.

The political front reveals even more potential chaos: there are now 329 parties registered nationally by the Independent Electoral Authority, with another 1,229 registered at provincial and municipal level.

The title of Alan Paton’s famous book comes to mind: Cry, the beloved country.