Nothing About This Is Inevitable: Gavin Mueller on Automation, AI, and a Different Future

It's easy to treat the current AI moment as inevitable — training data has already been scraped, chatbots are already answering questions once put to therapists and professors, and resistance can feel like it's arriving too late to matter. Prof. Gavin Mueller of the University of Amsterdam pushes back directly on that framing. In this closing part of a three-part conversation, Mueller traces AI's dependence on data most people never agreed to hand over — including the Anthropic author-settlement case he raises as a rare concrete answer to that consent question — and warns that offloading one's own thinking onto a chatbot makes a person, in his words, "easier to govern." But he closes on a different note than fatalism: the same power structures that make AI feel inevitable are already generating resistance, and — as with the Luddites before him — insisting on a different future is itself a meaningful act.

Overview

Episode 19 closes the three-part conversation with Prof. Gavin Mueller, carrying the arc's central question — does mechanization serve those it displaces, or only the interests that deploy it? — into the present moment. Mueller opens with Shoshana Zuboff's early industrial sociology, work he finds especially valuable for its close attention to how computerized factory interfaces abstracted workers from the embodied, sensory knowledge of their own labor, before she became known for her later work on surveillance capitalism. The conversation then turns to artificial intelligence: Mueller's case that systems like ChatGPT depend on data — books, Wikipedia entries, social posts — gathered without most people's agreement, illustrated by the Anthropic author-settlement detail he raises. From there, Mueller develops the idea of cognitive offloading, arguing that a public that outsources its thinking to a chatbot becomes, in his words, easier to govern. The episode closes on the rapidly growing, cross-partisan resistance movement against AI data centers, and on Mueller's own refusal to be a "doomer": his argument that the Luddites, and the resistance he sees forming now, represent not a rejection of the future but an insistence that a different one remains possible.

Key Moments from the Conversation

1. "A Less Palpable Understanding of What You're Doing"

Mueller describes Zuboff's 1980s research inside factories shifting to computer interfaces: workers whose embodied knowledge — recognizing a smell, judging the weight of something by hand — was replaced by reading a display or listening for a buzzer or a light. Mueller connects this directly back to Taylor, arguing that computerization achieves the same abstraction and isolation of the worker from the totality of production that scientific management was already after.

2. "We Didn't Consent to That"

Mueller argues that AI would not exist without platforms that collected enormous amounts of data — text from Wikipedia, social media, and scraped books — freely provided by users who never agreed to its later use. He points to the Anthropic author-settlement process, which lets writers check whether their books were used in the company's training data and claim compensation if so, as a rare case where the consent question received a concrete legal answer rather than remaining an abstract argument.

3. Cognitive Offloading and the "Easier to Govern"

Mueller warns that habitually letting a chatbot do one's thinking, a term he coins  — "cognitive offloading" — means a person never develops their own thoughts. He draws a direct parallel to Taylorized labor: just as a deskilled worker becomes a cog management can slot anywhere, a person who stops thinking for themselves becomes, in his words, "much easier to govern, much easier to control... less critical, less interesting."

4. "Nothing Inevitable About This Stuff"

Mueller points to the rapidly growing, cross-partisan resistance movement against AI data centers as evidence against fatalism, explaining that "when you create these kinds of power structures, you're also creating forms of resistance." He closes the interview — and the three-part arc — by arguing that the Luddites were never opposed to the future itself, only to having a future imposed on them without consent, and that people today can still "change the world and change the future" if they organize to do it.

Guest Spotlight

Gavin Mueller is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam, where he also teaches Marxist Theory for the Critical Studies MA at the Sandberg Instituut. He holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from George Mason University. He is a Contributing Editor at Jacobin and a member of the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine. He is the author of Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job (Verso, 2021), the book at the center of this three-part conversation, and Media Piracy in the Cultural Economy (Routledge, 2019).

For Further Reading

Primary Sources

Gavin Mueller, Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job (Verso, 2021) — the book at the center of this three-part conversation.

Questions to Consider Based on This Episode

Mueller argues that AI's training data was gathered without most people's consent — does the Anthropic author-settlement precedent suggest a workable model for addressing that, or is it too narrow a fix for the scale of the issue?

Mueller draws a direct line from Taylor's deskilling of factory workers to "cognitive offloading" today — where else might that same logic of separating people from their own knowledge and judgment be showing up?

Across all three parts of this conversation, Mueller insists the Luddites were never against the future itself — only against having one imposed on them. How does that reframing change what it means to call oneself a Luddite today?

Connection to Notions of Progress

Notions of Progress exists to surface the debates embedded in the word "progress," not resolve them. This closing installment carries the question raised across the whole Mueller arc — does mechanization serve those it displaces, or only the interests that deploy it? — into the present, from Zuboff's surveillance capitalism to today's debates over artificial intelligence. Mueller's own answer stops short of resolving the debate: he argues resistance is itself generated by the same power structures it opposes, and that nothing about the current moment is inevitable, leaving the question of what comes next genuinely open.

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Website — notionsofprogress.com

Email: marshall@notionsofprogress.com