Utopian exploitation
Tech barons want you to work till you drop, then replace you with machines
Back in 2021, I wrote an article for Jacobin inspired by a series of images by the early 20th century French artist Jean-Marc Côté and some of his collaborators for a never realized exhibit called En L’An 2000. The pictures all depict a future where much of work is automated, and the burden of performing tedious or backbreaking tasks is born primarily by machines.
I’ve found no evidence Côté was a Marxist or someone working from the basis of a political agenda. Instead, he seems to have been expressing what was for decades (and perhaps centuries) the dominant idea of futurism. Even at the height of industrial capitalism, it seemed self-evident to many that technology could one day liberate us from labour and hardship. When people envisioned the future, many quite rationally imagined a society of leisure.
I thought of Côté’s images again thanks to a recent memo sent by Google co-founder Sergey Brin to employees working on the development of its Gemini AI models. Essentially, Brin (net worth $144 billion) is trying to force his employees to pull 60-hour weeks so the company’s AI program can get a jump on its various competitors. “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity,” Brin remarks in the memo’s money quote. “A number of folks work less than 60 hours and a small number put in the bare minimum to get by…This last group is not only unproductive but also can be highly demoralizing to everyone else.”
So here we all are, in a future where technology has made real flying cars, sent people into space, and cured any number of previously incurable diseases. In spite of this, the world of work is increasingly arduous and precarious — even for workers in rich countries who hold the highly specialized skills necessary to do AI modelling.
The deeper irony, of course, is that one of the main reasons people like Brin are so invested in developing that technology in the first place is because they’re hoping to automate huge numbers of jobs out of existence, doing the same old thing capitalists have been doing since the advent of the industrial age: cutting labour costs while increasing profits. Eliminating jobs, of course, might in theory have the emancipatory potential people like Côté once imagined if it weren’t for the small wrinkle of people needing to earn a living so they don’t become homeless or starve.
In our brave new world of self-driving cars and supercomputers, however, a small and immensely powerful class of owners is still hoarding much of the world’s wealth and maintaining its private regime of control over technologies that could otherwise be used for the common good.
An industrial baron worth $144 billion telling his employees to pull the hours of a Dickensian slum child so he can win the race automate workers’ jobs out of existence? You’ll find a subtler account of greed and exploitation in the Communist Manifesto.
In the US It's a dead letter even in a Democratic government, but I'm curious if there's anything like Sen Sanders' 32 hour work week effort in Canada.