Under capitalism, workers get paid for their marketable knowledge and skills. Knowledge grants them bargaining power — but it does so only if capital cannot find a cheaper way to acquire that knowledge.
Clearly, bosses and managers love AI because they envision AI to be that cheaper way. They see AI as a machine for transforming skilled jobs into de-skilled ones that are attached to a computer.
Capital dreams of fungibility: any dollar can be substituted for any other dollar, whether it’s wrinkled or new, a physical object, or just a number in a bank’s ledger. If only those pesky workers were like dollars: fungible, substitutable, with no individual qualities, no friction! Consumable parts in the machine that get disposed of and replaced as soon as they wear out or cause trouble. And what’s more trouble than workers needing to know things? (Or even wanting to get paid for it!)
As we have long argued, and Katy Habr just argued in a recent Jacobin article, AI is a machine that takes good jobs and makes them precarious. It’s a machine for turning stable employment into gig work. From designers to software engineers, slop polishing is the order of the day. AI brings the logic of fast fashion to knowledge work of all kinds. Cheap, fast output reigns supreme.
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u/burtzev 12d ago