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

0:00 You know, she's talking about how, you know, if you had worked in petrochemicals, you would, your senses were different. You would, you would, your, you had to recognize certain smells or the weight of something. You know, your whole body was kind of involved in what you were doing. And then all that stuff kind of gets computerized. And now you're just reading kind of displays or you're, or you're listening for, uh, you know, a buzzer or a beeper or a light. And you have a, a, a, a much more abstracted sense of what you're doing and a less palpable understanding of what you're doing. It's highly, highly likely that they will push people who have mental health needs to chatbots rather than to human therapists.

0:44 At least in the US, AI would not exist if we didn't have platforms that collected tons and tons of data. If, it would not be, ChatGPT would not be able to output these, you know, really polished sentences if there weren't tons and tons of text online, texts that we provided, right? Hi, welcome to Notions of Progress, the show that traces ideas of progress from antiquity to the age of AI. In part two, Professor Gavin Mueller traced a through line from Marx's own ambivalence about machinery through the split between orthodox and heterodox strands of Marxism, to Frederick Taylor's theory of workplace control, uh, the technocracy movement's apocalyptic vision of automation, and Norbert Wiener's attempt as one of cybernetics founding figures to warn what automation would mean for their power.

1:48 In this final part, Professor Mueller brings that history into the present. The conversation then moves from Shoshana Zuboff's early research of computerized factory floors to her later work on surveillance capitalism, and from there into Professor Mueller's own reading of artificial intelligence, training data, cognitive offloading, and what he sees as Luddism's real legacy, not a rejection of the future, but an insistence that a different one is still possible And one of the figures that you raised, again, moving closer and closer to the, to the present was Shoshana Zuboff, and I thought that was also- Oh, yeah … a very, very interesting, right?

2:30 I mean- Yeah, so she- You wanna talk a little bit about her, like, perspective on this because- Yeah. You know, she had this, you know, really big book on surveillance capitalism kind of like laying out, um, you know, how Google actually works and, and I think that was really eye-opening for a lot of people. But I really like her earlier work where she's in factories, which is some of the earlier places where, you know, we don't think of You know, we think of computers, you think of a tech company or an office, right? But, but she was looking at factories that were st- shifting to computer interfaces and, um, digitized forms of measurement and things like that. And really, you know, she was like a kind of industrial sociologist, like really w- w- what's, what kind of effects are that having? Now she's not a Marxist. She does read Marxist, and she's very clear, like, "Okay, but that's not really where I'm coming from." But she has a very detailed, nuanced kind of description of what's happening.

3:20 And it's really… So, so I found a lot of her work from the '80s really interesting to read. You know, she's talking about how, you know, if you had worked in petrochemicals, you would… Your senses were different. You would, you would, your, you had to recognize certain smells or the weight of something. You know, your whole body was kind of involved in what you were doing. And then all that stuff kind of gets computerized. So now you're just reading kind of displays, or you're, or you're listening for, um, you know, a buzzer or a beeper or a light. And you have a, a, um, a much more abstracted sense of what you're doing and a less palpable understanding of what you're doing. In some ways, right, it's very easy to see what she's saying as kind of, you know, you know, achieving some of the things that Taylor was really interested in.

4:07 We don't want the workers to know how their work, what their work actually does. We want them to engage in repetitive actions that are abstracted from the, the totality of, of production. And what she kind of reveals is that computerization is very good at, at, at isolating and also abstracting through, through the development of, of, of these kind of digital interfaces and things like that. In- incredible. And again, it was very poignant in the book. And, and when, and when I read that same book about her la- her latest work, and then she went into the whole section I thought was very interesting about this conception of managing time as well. The Chronos she was talking about. Mm. Yeah. The idea of using applications to make sure that people didn't go over 35 hours, whatever it was, so that they wouldn't get benefits.

4:50 So, you know, as you can see during this interview, what I'm, what I continually doing is that if you start to remove the labels from a certain… It takes so much about what the Luddites, what their interests were in terms of- Mm. Mm-hmm … you know, they seem, they seem to… It's just a continual story I see that- Yeah shows up in different manifestations under different systems and a non-Marxist in, in that case. And like I said, I think you did such a good job of- No … of, of, of doing this. I mean this. And, and now w- I know we just have a couple, a couple minutes left here. Sure. Let, let's talk about AI because- Okay. … this is, this is, this is the… You know, this is really And by the way, you wrote this book, what, two years ago? Two and a half years ago? No, longer than that. So it came out in 2021. 20- Excuse me. Excuse me, yeah. So it came out, but I finished it in 2020, so- Right.

5:32 Right, right, right … so yeah, AI, uh- AI was, AI was barely on the radar. It was- Yeah but, but you really, that was only a cognoscente in Silicon Valley understood its implications at that point. Right. Like things like machine learning and things like that, there was a little bit around the edges, but, but ChatGPT and, and, and that kind of stuff, no, absolutely not, right? The way that it's just become integrated into everyday life, you know, wasn't something that I could foresee at that point. But it is interesting to kind of, you know, in some ways it's… Well, don't, I, I could do this, but I, I don't know. I have mixed feelings 'cause I, I li- I like to do new things, but it'd be very easy to write like an AI chapter, right? Uh, to add on to this. Because if you s- look at what it's doing, right? What is the excitement about AI?

6:14 How are people talking about it, right? It's about, you know, you could, you could potentially do any, a lot of different things with these kind of tools, right? With these kind of applications, with these kind of technologies, right? But the thing that they, everyone talks about is how do you automate work, right? How do you put journalists out of a job? How do you put even, you know, university people who teach in university, put them out of a j- they can talk to a chatbot. Therapists, you know, all of this, and this is, these are things that are not just speculative. These are things that are happening right now, right? It's highly, highly likely that they will push people who have mental health needs to chatbots rather than to human therapists, at least in the US.

6:57 In Europe, uh, where we are now, it's much more highly regulated and these transitions can't happen rapidly. I was talking to someone about this, like, uh, the, in, in the US, when a new technology is developed, the, there, it's just, y- you're almost free to experiment on you know, 350 million people, right? And, and you can't do that. You know, you, "Oh, we have glasses that track everything and film everything secretly." Yeah, just let people wear those. You can never do that in Europe, right? And so anyway, the, the, so the ways that people are talking about what AI can do, right, is purely about automating labor, right? It, and, and, and now all the old things about, oh, what are we gonna do with a, a post-work society and universal basic income, all those things that people were really, uh, interested in about 10 years ago or so are, are, are, are kind of coming back in a sort of m- m- a slightly more evil way maybe, but.

7:49 And, and yeah, and I think it's also really notable too that, you know, the way that AI works is that it's It's one of those things where I think people find it particularly galling, not just because they don't like to use it or they feel threatened by it, but it's commonly understood that this stuff was trained on what we've already done, right? AI would not exist if we didn't have platforms that collected tons and tons of data. If it would not be- ChatGPT would not be able to output these, you know, really polished sentences if there weren't tons and tons of text online, texts that we provided, right? It wasn't- Right … corporations putting it on there, right? It was, you know, volunteers on Wikipedia or it was, you know, you chatting with your friends on Facebook or something like that.

8:36 That stuff is all scraped. It's books. Um, they've scraped tons of books. Although I will say, and I don't know if this is deliberate, so Anthropic has a settlement, right? With everybody, you can put your name in if you published a book and see if they used your book in their data set, and they're gonna owe you some money if, if that's the case. My book's not in there, so I was a little disappointed by that. But, uh, It's hard to imagine, actually. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe it was deliberate. Maybe they didn't want to- Yeah. Hard to imagine. Yeah. So, but it's, uh… Yeah, so, uh, 'cause yeah, way more, like, tons of obscure books are in there, but, but I couldn't find any of my stuff. So no settlement for me. Um, so, so it's, it's, I think strikes people as particularly galling that, that we, uh, this thing that's set to disrupt, um, our world, it, you know, was created by, you know, taking our activity and manipulating it and then, and then giving it back to us in the form of this, in this machine and when, you know, we didn't consent to that and we didn't, uh, agree to it and, and we… And many people don't find that, uh, particularly exciting, right?

9:37 And, and, you know- Again, kind of looking at the different flavors and chapters in this book, there's a sedimentary quality to this in the sense that many of the things that you're talking about, applied Taylorism, these things show up inside as the manifestation. And I also was going to say that another important point that I, that, that I got from, from reading your book was this. So, and, and y- and I, I love the fact that you come back to bring this centrally back to a labor issue. Mm-hmm. So that's really helpful. And, not but, and at the same time, you also make a very good point throughout the book of just tying it to all these other flavors that people are not th- concerns that people have now. So in other words, you know, now whereas maybe the Luddites were concerned about labor issues or concerned about the, the, their end product, with a lot of the issues that come around about AI are about the environment.

10:27 They're not… They're about labor- Mm-hmm … and they're about other things. Sure. They're about the environment, they're about the, the degradation of, degradation of work, which you make a, a, a strong argument throughout the book as well. Mm-hmm. Um, but also the degradation of social life, the degradation of- Yeah … of skill sets, the degradation of intellectuals. I'm just saying it's… The, the list keeps expanding, so I, I found it particularly interesting as well. You know, the, a lot of the same th- You know, I'm kind of influenced by some of these heterodox Marxist thinkers who I think had a little bit better understanding of, of the granular nature of class struggle, but also a critical understanding of technology. Uh, some of the stuff that emerges out of there is looking at things that are not, like wage labor in a workplace, and saying, "Well, they're, these things are also kind of subject to a lot of the similar dynamics," right?

11:11 And I think you can see how other things that we wouldn't call work are also being automated by these technologies, and that has potentially p- bad effects. So, um, for instance, a, a, a just a really easy example is something like people who, you know, kind of develop a relationship with their chatbot, right? Their, their, their social life is essentially being automated, right? So that, um You know, you don't have to deal with the complexity of another human being. It's more convenient, but also, of course, it leads to all sorts of problems because these chatbots are, are sort of set up to sort of, um, uh, you know, be very, uh, deferential and, and these kinds of things, and also to be very, um, i- in a way, seductive, right?

11:54 They want you to keep using them. So, so, you know, there's a process… There's something that happens when things are automated, right? Which is that the skill required to do something is no longer necessary, right? This is precisely what the Luddites were against. You have a machine, these-- This, our whole kind of working world that's around transferring these skills, developing ourselves, that give us a feeling of power and mastery over what we do, right? Such, such a, I feel like, an important quality in, in, as a human being are, are gonna be taken away from us, right? We're just gonna be pulling a crank or whatever. And if we're doing that to other aspects of our, our life, our social life, right? Um, we're gonna lose those skills as well.

12:35 So one thing that people-- One skill that w- a lot of people are really concerned about is just literacy, right? If a chatbot can summarize, if it can write an email for you, then that's something you're not developing yourself. For me, you know, someone who likes to read and write, you know, that's kind of how I ended up where I am, um, you know, that seems quite tragic Uh, and, and maybe even deeply problematic. And that-- Because I think when you reading and writing and doing those things is, uh, developing yourself as a thinker as well. So there's this thing that they call cognitive offloading, right? Which is when you let the chatbot do something for you. Well, if you do that for everything, you'll never develop your own thoughts. You will… And in-- And if you're-- And just like a, a worker who is-- whose skills are taken from them and becomes a kind of cog that Taylor can, you know, slot wherever he likes, if you're not able to think, you will also become much easier to govern, much easier to control, right?

13:31 Less critical, less interesting, but also potentially more easy to dominate, right? Um, so I think there's a larger kind of problem that we're faced with. I think the silver lining of that is many, many people are, are deeply concerned about this. Don't know what to do about it yet. So it's a very new problem, um, but we're already seeing, you know, tons of anxiety about the reading stuff. Even people on the far right are, like, now obsessed with books, and you have to read great books, and it's, like, so good for you, right? Which to me I see as symptomatic of this change. Um, here in the Netherlands, and I know it's happening in the States and in many other places, parents are now really keen on banning smartphones.

14:12 And right now it's kind of a, a voluntary thing. You sort of… But it's a s-- uh, you know, a bunch of parents get together, and they get the school to enact some rules. But it's extremely, uh, popular and well-developed. Uh, they have funded positions, and this is something that's happened very rapidly. So to me, this is, you know… I think there's always… You know, I'm not a doomer on these kinds of issues because when you create these kind of power structures, you're, you're also creating forms of resistance. And then it's our job to say resistance is de-- you know, to recognize it, to think about how different types of resistance can be kind of connected, uh, together, you know, either practically or just conceptually, or maybe as part of a larger movement.

14:54 And, and that so many people are concerned with this to me says that there's a, um, um, you know, there's a, a, a real potential to, to enact change. I mean, I'm kind of waiting, although sometimes I'm concerned about who Might answer this call. When are politicians going to start recognizing, like, look, a lot of people… I mean, they are, right? Now you have massive movements against data centers in the States. You have them here too, actually. But it's becoming such a hot button issue that cuts across existing political categories, right? People are saying, "Look, Republican, Democrat, I don't wanna live next to a data center. I don't like what the data… I- not only do I not wanna live next to it, I don't like what the data center's being used to do.

15:34 I don't care about this stuff. It doesn't help me at all." 92% of all productive investment this year in the United States is for AI, and most of that is data centers. And who does that benefit, right? It benefits the stock price of AI companies. Right. Right. Um, and possibly it benefits the technologies, although, you know, but it's not gonna, you know, radically change anyone's life and, and there are very few jobs generated in these data centers, right? So if your politicians, "Oh, we're gonna build a data center, there'll be jobs," there's gonna be like six jobs, okay? And they're all security guards. These things don't need workers, right? They're totally automated. And people are against it, and I think that's, to me, really powerful, and I, I think it, it, you know, helps demonstrate some of my arguments that technology is this flashpoint, and that, you know, if we're interested in, in mass scale political change, that if we pay attention to these things and we say, "Look, your problems, you're not being irrational when you don't want a data center there.

16:29 That's very rational. There are a lot of reasons that you shouldn't, that, you know, there's some that you already know, and then there's maybe some that you don't even know about yet. So let's talk about that." I'm really waiting for, for, for which politicians start really picking up on this more techno, techno, uh, tech critical kind of sentiment that's- Mm-hmm that's becoming really, really important. Because right now I think both parties are just, you know, do, you know, build the data centers, get the tax breaks. These AI companies are the future. What are you gonna do? We want them to, you know, donate to us and not the other side, so we're not gonna do anything to upset that. So I think there's a lot of it's being left on the table. Here, here in the Netherlands as well, I mean, we have a lot more political parties, and some of them are starting to think about the data center stuff, but again, I, I think it's, you know, it's, it's not quite a f- a major agenda point at the moment.

17:22 But to me, you know, I think there… It won't be, it won't be wide open for, for, for much longer, I would say. I think, I think it's gonna start getting claimed, it's gonna start becoming a major issue, and to me, that's really interesting. Uh, you know, obviously it's good for me, I guess, because maybe it makes my book seem more relevant. But I think, you know, it's also just, you know, coming from the perspective of saying I, I'm, I like when people can come together and demand, uh, something different, something new and something better Instead of assuming that things are always getting better, assuming that- Right, right … what's good for, what's good for OpenAI is good for everyone or whatever it is, that, that we have a very different way of thinking about the world and what would make it better.

18:03 Um, to me, uh, you know, I, I find that very encouraging. And, and it real- again, it really comes, comes through in the book. And, and I, I think maybe I, I would love to end on one particular quote that you have that I- Sure … again, that applies directly, again, to this connective tissue. You have in, in discussion of Marx, you said you made a reference to, to Marx referencing the sorcerer who's no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called upon his spells. And I think that description that you just gave there of AI, like also connects to that in the sense of these are some of the things we know about, but we really haven't even talked about. Yeah. A lot of the people who are afraid for things that they don't know about. Yeah.

18:43 They don't know what, what these, what this future is gonna look like, what, what these, what this technology is going to bring. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, you know, like I said, when the, you know… In reading your book, when I thought about, you know, breaking things at work and breaking machines at work, it's a way I, I looked at the word at work as almost like in process. Breaking… And, and the machines were the, as you said earlier, was this notion of control, right? Yeah. 'Cause that, I think that was, like, also again, just a, as a last final point, just the importance, this, the symbolic aspect of what this was. I, I looked at, I looked at your work in a, in a, in a little bit more of a symbolic way. Mm. Like what it is represented and the continuum to me seems, seems quite- Yeah quite clear.

19:23 Yeah. I think if we, you know, if we want… I, I think the, the, what most people imagine the good life to be is not dependent on new technologies, right? People want more time to spend doing the things that they like to do. They want accessible environments. They, they want clean environments. They, you know, they wanna have enough. They want to not worry. And it doesn't seem to me that new technologies, and particularly AI, is, is satisfying any of that. And in fact, it's seems like it's undermining quite a lot of it. Uh, and so to me, that's a great sign at, you know, saying, to, to say, look, you know, it's, it's okay to, to say you don't like it and to, to be against it.

20:04 There's nothing inevitable about this stuff. Even the people in the industry are like, think it's a bubble, you know? And when that bubble pops, who knows what's gonna happen? Except that, you know, um, well, we'll see where, who, who actually loses money on it. You know, that'll, that'll be, that'll depend on the balance of forces at the time and what people are able to insist upon, right? So, so I think that's another thing that I in- think about more and more is, you know, what, what it, you know… And, and so in that sense, it's not quite a plan for creating a fully automated luxury communist society or something like that, but it is, I think, maybe Uh, I guess something a little more vague or m- a little more abstract of like what, what is the good life to people, right?

20:45 This is a class- the classic question of philosophy, right? What is the good life? And, and in some ways, I think that when we feel like we're in this kind of crisis point where something really big is happening and we don't necessarily like it, and we don't necessarily know what's going on, you know, that can be anxiety producing. But I think it's also maybe a moment that helps us to… But potentially we can clarify, well, what is, what, what, what would we like to happen, you know? I think one thing that I'm very keen on is that the Luddites opposed technologies, but they were not opposed to the future. You know, they wanted a different kind of future. They wanted a different, you know, adoption of technologies. They wanted to preserve some things. They didn't wanna go back to the past.

21:26 They just didn't want to have everything taken from them, right? And I think to me, that's another thing that I'm kind of keen on in the book. You're like, okay, if you wanna say you're a Luddite now, and more and more people do, it's not because you wanna like go back to the '90s or something like that. It's because you recognize that there, we could have a different future, right? Instead of going back to the past, a different type of future with a different sort of relationship to technology and a different relationship to each other, um, and a different sort of way of making things and doing things and living our lives. Uh, and, and that to me is, is kind of, yeah, that's, that to me is kind of the, the, the point of, of this, right? Is that, uh, you know, I don't wanna… I, I agree with Mark.

22:07 Trying to hold onto the past, it's n- just never really gonna work. But you can sort of say, you know, there's a future coming that I don't want, and, and, and it's good to be reminded that those futures are not inevitable, that, you know, I do believe that people can change the world and change the future, right? If we, if we can figure out, um, how to get together to do it. Even when we don't, we still, we still make ripples, right? And I, I think the Luddites are, are one, uh, really powerful ripple that continues to kind of, uh, resonate, uh, in our, in our moment. Well, Gavin, I think that is the perfect note to end on. And I will say I cannot thank you enough for your generosity, for your, for your, you know, sage words here. Oh. And I hope that this was, uh, enjoyable for you.

22:48 Absolutely, yeah. And, um, thank you again for coming on, and I'm looking forward to reading more of your work- Okay, great … and discussing that. Well, yeah. And thank you for coming. It's been a great, it's been great to chat. Fantastic. Thank you. Next time on Notions of Progress, we turn from the politics of machinery to the mechanics of the market itself. We have a very special guest, Michael Roberts, an economist who spent over thirty years in the city of London and is the author of The Long Depression. He joins us to lay out his Marxist account of capitalism's boom and slump cycles, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and what that theory actually says about three periods he treats as genuine depressions rather than ordinary downturns: the eighteen seventies, the nineteen thirties, and the period that we're living through since 2008.

23:39 We'll get into the counterarguments too, from the Austrian School to Thomas Piketty, and where Michael Roberts thinks capitalism goes from here. Looking forward to it