Or more Marxistly, AI critique reifies a political-economic movement as a technological force. This mystification helps naturalize the disruption of existing labor arrangements while directing critique away from the movement seeking to remake social relations through AI.
I think that's true, but it's important to point out that this recapitulates the reification inherent in privately owned means of production itself. When, say, there is AI-surveillance in Amazon warehouses, it really does replace a direct relation of control with a machine-mediated one
It's more developed in the private sector, i think. The war on the "new class," "pmc," or whatever you want to call it has been going on for at least five decades. These changes are at least as much about destroying a management stratum and removing opportunities for discretion as anything else.
Agreed! We actually call that aspect Techno-Taylorism, and talk about the industrial production of oversight/management without managers in 'Why We Fear AI'
It gets you focusing on a thing instead of a process; they get you looking at the car, and not the people building freeways and ripping out the streetcar tracks.
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