"AI is widely used to describe a disparate, and in many cases contradictory, set of technologies. While the term defies consensus, a clear picture of its impacts is emerging. Our participants described it as a largely negative force reorganising their work: increasing output expectations, changing skills requirements, expanding monitoring, degrading expertise, shifting accountability, and creating divisions between colleagues. AI applications rarely remove work; they redistribute and intensify it.
Workers stressed that positive uses depend on their ability to decide for themselves how to engage with AI. The central problem is not simply whether AI works well, but how it is introduced, controlled, measured and used by employers. Put simply, it is useful only when one gets to choose if and how to use them.
The problems identified are not derived from any technical limits of today’s models. Poor quality outputs, hallucinations and weak code do have an impact, but they are only part of the picture. This is because employers use AI to intensify work, rationalise redundancies, eliminate junior hiring, increase surveillance, deskill and downskill workers, shift risk onto employees and weaken their agency. Even as models improve, the underlying workplace issues will remain if workers do not gain enforceable rights over how AI is used, at work and in society at large.
Tech workers are deeply concerned over AI’s harmful impacts on the environment, in military and state surveillance contexts, and on mental health. This is why the Inquiry’s recommendations focus less on functionality and more on who controls and benefits from it.
Workers must be actively empowered to defend and extend their rights. This includes enforceable power over how AI is introduced, used, monitored and evaluated at work.
Workers must be given the final decision over how, or if, they use AI tools at work."
https://techworkersinquiry.org/ai/
#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #TechWork #WageSlavery #Capitalism
