Tech Disruptions have Led to Deep Churn in the Nature of Work

Tech disruptions have led to deep churn in the nature of the work of white-collar workers

Rage against the machine has existed since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. From the earliest saboteurs in France who attempted to destroy power looms in the 17th century to the labor union protests against mechanization and, more recently, the CPM and Samajwadi Party's opposition to computerization in India's public sector in the 1990s, tech "disruptions" have caused a profound shift in the nature of work. However, there is a propensity right now to see the imminent changes in work and life brought about by advancements in artificial intelligence as particularly cataclysmic. This inclination may be reinforced by the narcissistic exaggeration created by social media.

There is a moral panic that seems to be spreading over the nature of intellectual and creative effort because of two AI-powered applications, ChatGPT and Lensa to a lesser extent. Everyone from authors, editors, professors, and various white-collar workers has been concerned about occupations becoming obsolete and plagiarism spreading since ChatGPT, an open-source AI-based text-generating tool, was made public in December. The bot's developers, OpenAI, recently said that they would develop a kind of watermark to make plagiarism easy to see. Lensa, on the other hand, uses AI to produce gorgeous photographs with a nuance that was previously believed to be a human-only domain.

No computer can ever be intelligent enough to produce the tragedy of a Dostoyevsky or the insight of a great scholar, according to the standard response to the concern that AI would take over duties that are inherently "human" Perhaps the more pertinent question is why upper-class interests and occupations are first valued as being more "basic." The human condition did not change when accountants were replaced by computers or when entire villages of weavers were wiped out by mass manufacturing. It may be argued that agriculture and craft are equally as significant and human as words and art. Perhaps the strength and self-importance of those technologies' "disruptors" are what distinguish the power loom from AI.