Instrumentalizing the public sphere through fear.

Even though exploring the economical context of a well-known phenomena like automation does not provide us with a valuable and imminent reason to worry about it, the fear narrative persists in the public sphere.

For months now on every screen in front of you, AI will appear constantly and repetitively, not being shy about reproducing the next idiosyncratic and sensational stories. The sparkle that lit this futurist public discourse was of course the emergence of ChatGPT early this year. OpenAI’s artificial intelligence chatbot took everyone by storm and the news machine hasn’t stopped since then. 

Each headline about AI is mind-blowing and the public relations machine is quickly planting seeds in the fertile environment of paranoia and misrepresentation. It needs just a quick Google search to realize it. The headlines are totally dystopian, fictional and quite unsettling, as if they were directly extracted from a science fiction movie, far from the standard boring syntax of the mainstream media. In fact, I can see them used as supers for the next AI apocalypse movie trailer. Headlines like Arstechnina’s Why AI detectors think the US Constitution was written by AI [5] or The Guardians’s Australian DishBrain team wins $600,000 grant to merge AI with human brain cells [6], are neither unusual nor hard to find.

The recent SAG-AFTRA strike further spiked stories on this subject, in a reality influenced by fiction and vice versa: Actors say Hollywood studios want their AI replicas — for free, forever [7] or The Black Mirror plot about AI that worries actors [8], are some of the thousands headlines you’ll encounter everywhere in the web.

This stream of absurdity, surrealism and megalomania constitutes a platform of enhancing fear,  misinformation and confusion. It generates the ground for instrumentalism. It generates the ground for public relations activities, speculations, working place structural changes to further advance business agendas and generate enormous profit. For example Mr. Musk, a name closely linked to the magic two-letter acronym, not long after he joined the call of various experts for a pause in the creation of an artificial intelligence mind, claiming that the world is not “safe”, announced his own plans to build a new AI company.

The average worker that sells his time for money is constantly living in fear of losing his job, a fear he is not benefiting from, but it is constantly fueled by the information he consumes in his everyday life. Even though examples like Uber or Amazon have established the idea that capitalism can now work without controlling the means of production, it is still a fact that in our economic system the means of production are controlled by the lucky few.

The working class, white or blue collar, doesn’t have any access, control or say in the way the means of production and any other technological invention is used or going to be used. In this setting, governmental interventions have to come up with clear regulations regarding possible mass unemployment, the use of non-human labor or profits from the use of technology in different business sectors.

The fear that a machine may take your job and quickly automate your human skills has roots in the history of industrial development, commercialization and cultural representations of technology. People have feared automation since the first day they realized that they can be replaced by a machine.

In a labor system like the one above, where the worker has no say in working conditions, in the morals behind it, in the technology used, in leisure time and the culture industry that consumes it, fear is an ambiguous feeling; it is rational and irrational at the same time. It is constantly reproduced from economic and cultural structures in our everyday life.

Society needs to act, governments need to act. Technology in the working place and cyberspace in general needs serious management and real regulations, new rules have to apply to the ones with the stick and the carrot.