We're Worrying About Artificial Intelligence for the Wrong Reasons

Critics of generative AI like ChatGPT often worry about its impact on work. In this talk, philosopher Tyler Re argues that the debate about AI and work tends to focus on the wrong questions. In academic philosophy, most of the writing on AI and work is about the "end of work" —total productive automation—to the exclusion of AI's more immediate effects. In the media, discussion of AI and work often concentrates on AI's sophistication, its ability to approximate human intelligence. But the sophistication of a workplace technology has little to do with whether or not there is less work available to workers, or what that work looks like.

Re focuses on some questions that few are asking, ones that reveal a number of pressing ethical issues related to AI and work: who owns this technology, and how will they use it? Most workplace technology is not owned by workers, but by companies, and for companies, generative AI is a labor-saving technology. The history of labor-saving technology in the US and Europe shows that, while most workers retained their jobs or found new ones once their old jobs were automated, the character of those jobs changed significantly. Highly-automated manufacturing jobs became simpler, less meaningful, and required less critical thinking than before. This transformation is not simply a product of how sophisticated labor-saving technology is, but rather how companies employ it to standardize the work process, limiting workers' opportunities for judgment and autonomy on the job.

The implications of seeing AI as a labor-saving technology are broad. For one, it helps us see past the common debate between techno-optimists and techno-pessimists. According to Re, the mere introduction of generative AI in the workplace does not determine its likely effects on the workplace, nor whether or not we should be optimistic about these effects. Seeing AI as a labor-saving technology instead of as a labor-ending technology also helps us predict its effect on the vast majority of working people who will soon labor alongside AI. The problem of labor-saving AI raises the larger question about what makes work “meaningful.” Generative AI, when used as a labor-saving technology, threatens our ability to find meaning at work.

The talk will be followed by a Q&A with the speaker.

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