The list of grievances is long: slop, cheating, bias, enfeeblement, electricity bills, environmental destruction, exploitation, theft, cybercrime, doom. But resistance to the technology has often taken the form of shaming people for personally using it, with precious little organizing against the companies building the machines. This is perplexing, given that those companies are attempting to render us obsolete.
The executives may contest this framing, offering some bromides about how AI will augment human work or how we’ll simply find new jobs to do. But their clear goals are to create systems that so clearly surpass our abilities that we will have little hope of competing. OpenAI defines its north star of artificial general intelligence (AGI) as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work”.
And the Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, writes: “AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.” The industry’s ultimate ambition, what it calls AGI, is better understood as a universal labor-replacing machine. These systems would be able to do any work a human could do from a remote desk – leaving livelihoods safe to the extent a human touch is preferred, a physical presence is required, or the jobs themselves are legally protected. You may doubt that the industry will ever succeed in its perverse quest, but we should agree that it shouldn’t even be allowed to try.
We should freeze frontier AI development – that is, the effort to build AGI, and only resume the work when there is strong public buy-in and broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably. But realizing this commonsense ideal will require us to get organized enough to overcome the richest industry in history. And that means changing the way we think about AI.
In many corners of the internet, especially on the left, people pride themselves on never touching the stuff – while simultaneously making bold, deeply mistaken claims about its nature and capabilities. I understand the reluctance to give these companies your money, your data, your attention. But using what is increasingly an indispensable technology is not an endorsement of the industry building it, any more so than using Instagram to advocate for aggressive regulations on social media would be an endorsement of Mark Zuckerberg’s toxic empire.
Moreover, the people using AI are going to outcompete the ones who don’t, bending the world in their preferred direction, while forming a deeper understanding of the technology itself. Bosses will use Claude Code to replace workers, while the leftist policy analyst Matt Bruenig is having it build a publicly accessible, automatically updating database of National Labor Relations Board decisions. If you’re serious about your mission, you should use whichever tools work best.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
