EXACTLY. Pardon the overly long comment upcoming, but you made me think of something that I find fascinating—
There’s a corollary to — and support for — your point here, too, in that somebody could ALSO easily just become a very unfulfilled mess of a person if they even DID “ai-off-load” SUBSISTENCE-labor rather than wage labor.
Like, the primacy of “making more art” in the quote you sample— as the only thing we’d be doing if not working— feels like evidence that its author doesn’t understand labor in any other context than capitalism. It’s like she thinks that all the human body and mind unshackled from capitalism can be used for is intellectual pursuits. And that kinda reeks of western-enlightenment/cartesian-dualism kind of stuff, to me at least.
And to be clear, intellectual pursuits ARE important pursuits, but they’re not the ONLY ones worth spending time on, whether when living with wage-labor as a reality or not.
Yes, discounting manual labor as unworthy of “humans” not only suggests that those who DO end up tasked with that work are deemed “less than,” but it also might suggest that exerting oneself in endeavors OTHER THAN those considered more “high class” and therefore, arguably, more self-satisfied and entitled to praise (e.g; “art,” entertainment) are not worthy of us either.
But that attitude really doesn’t seem to engage with anthropological history as it regards how humans have spent their time/WITH whom for the vast majority of human history/before the advent of industrial-civilization.
Hell, plenty of indigenous people (apropos enough, a demographic over represented in the same socio-economic pool singled-out by implication when devaluing WAGED manual labor, if/when they get pulled into the capitalist system) have survived and continue to survive by way of subsistence labor to varying degrees; growing/foraging for/hunting a fair amount of their own food, building their own housing, etc. And that is usually something done as a divided-labor task; sure, every person might have a different role that they’re good at and stick with, BUT that doesn’t DEVALUE the other people’s roles by default. Just because you’re “an artist” and therefore “smart” doesn’t mean the carpenter or the gardener is lowly by comparison or “not smart.”
The point is not that the “hand work” is somehow more dignified or more “close to nature” than that of the mind, inherently (another basis for unhelpful myths about “noble savages” and whatnot)— but rather that intellectual subsistence labor (e.g: communal-bonding labor like setting up spiritual ceremonies) and physical subsistence labor (e.g: sourcing the food that those worshippers eat) cannot exist without each other. You can’t separate the manual from the intellectual because the people who are good at each NEED each other to survive.
Even if/when we live in a world where free-market relations no longer exist— there is still required a basic respect for each other’s roles. To sound annoyingly grad-school about it, a “dialectic “ is certainly present there!
Rugged individualism and the myth of “the lone genius” will leave you isolated, skill-less, or both: unable to enjoy your 21st century luxuries because you’ve devalued the workforce needed to sustain it so much that they’ll all get replaced by robots who do the job shittily; and/or unable to live in a collective fashion with others who happen to have different skills than you, because you’re too busy thinking you’re better than them to realize that you need each other.
Your comment does very well to build on what I only reductively named as “(corporate) obsession with convenience” but also contends with the common maxim of "I do not dream of labour."
I believe artists need experience outside of art to make good art. That even trickles down to something as small as doing housework. Personally, cleaning helps me with art so immensely that actually, my next album is an ode to the practices of cleanliness. I digress.
Perhaps the reasons why technological advancements of the Western world feel so vacuous because their progression is have been overly concerned with maximising convenience when, in art specifically, friction is such an integral part of the creation--not in some divine and idealised way but simply as the fertile ground for transformation.
The formulaic music many describe as an ear-sore is simply music without friction, a closely followed recipe with no extra personality. Civilisationally, we've reached a point where a beautiful voice isn't enough--perhaps because beautiful voices aren't, say, forged in the crucible of a gospel church and then transitioned into a music career. No, the beautiful voice nowadays is raised to only to be a beautiful voice, ergo the voice and the polish of the musical composition isn't enough because all of the components align so straightly that they feel like they lack a soul.
It is all definitely reminiscent of western-enlightenment/cartesian-dualism, which probably is advent of where we began to understand ourselves as machinery. Thus, art becomes more and more machine-like, especially as divorce further from things that made us feel in tune with nature (religion, tactile labour, etc). I much prefer to understand creativity as a garden. A watering can just works. A branch trimmer just works. Sunlight just works. Find the best sunlight spot for the plant. Give it water. Protect it from bugs that may eat it (or don't! bugs need homes, too). Give it a haircut if it gets unruly.
We are the same way so I agree with you, in short: the artist should do dishes just as much as the cleaners should dabble in crafts. If they want!
I hadn't considered the way that the pithy statement (having AI do the dishes) shows an inherent disdain or dismissal of those who do that work, but it's a great point! it also makes me think about how there's a lot of white western media that includes fantasies about having servants in different ways (like Bridgerton and the way that the lifestyles of the main characters are subsidized by the labor of hundreds if not thousands of people). I believe that Inigo has also previously used the term "responsibility abandonment" to describe this tendency or yearning of white people and wealthy people to wish to never have to do anything we don't want to - which is honestly pretty childish!
The jobs people often want AI to go for first are the ones held by those already marginalized in some way or another - financially, socially, emotionally. There is dignity in all types of work, but capitalism has detracted from some of those feelings and created contempt and ire in its place, as you write. Walzer's book Spheres of Justice has a whole chapter dedicated to Hard Work. Not hard work like jobs that are demanding physically or mentally, but work that is hard because it is dirty or not-often-wanted. Dishwashing, sanitation, some agricultural jobs -- these get offloaded by capitalistic societies onto individuals the capitalistic system wishes to (or whoever is easiest to) marginalize. In the case of the US, the prime example is immigrants. This creates a dissonance where politicians work to get immigrants out, yet uphold systems that cannot function without their presence. You can't deport everyone -- things would fall apart. But they try to push up to that line.
Walzer proposes instead a system that would probably be impossible to implement, but nonetheless is inspiring in its idealism: that these jobs should be drafted for like military positions and worked through as a rotation in society. Either you work these jobs as a conscripted service from 18-24, or people move in and out of the work for a week or two at a time, then going back to their original jobs. Doing this attempts to return a sense of dignity to the work, and also builds in feelings of respect for those that work the jobs full time by allowing opportunities for empathy. As I said, no way this happens (anytime soon). But it fills you with hope to think about, doesn't it?
loved your recent pieces on AI and capitalism...of course capitalism will love and promote AI at the expense of humans. it makes financial sense. ergo...
And yet! I see so many foaming at the mouth to use AI and the thing that strikes me is how desensitised we've become about our own involvement. I think we feel complicit in so many evils just by breathing that we're unable or unwilling to take principled stances if it means eschewing convenience. We are not willing to risk sacrificing the crumb of cheese we've been allowed to have.
the worst thing is that we are barely given the choice not to use it. its just been freely inserted into everything with no thought about implications other than for rhe unaccountable corporate interests for whom its effectively just another money harvesting optimisation tool.
this is such a good point! makes me think of talking with an older (retired) family member about how they don't want to support Jeff Bezos by shopping at Amazon but "it's just so convenient" - and I was like, yes, I know, that's literally how they get you- you (family member) have the time and resources to be slightly inconvenienced though! it's not even that hard 😔
AI is being forced on it and it is so difficult to resist bc it is showing up in what we consider basic every day activity. The word ChatGPT sends chills up my spine. It is a good thing that I am not a worrier bc there is much to worry about. From Jobs to relationships to being allowed to be human. Thank you for speaking about it.
i wonder if the anthropomorphizing of AI comes from a desire to offload the mechanisms of human emotion onto machines so we can make society into even more of an inhumane wasteland devoid of empathy, or maybe they're setting up for some sort of legal rights for AI systems just in case their science fiction/ketamine dreams of conscious machines comes to term
i think consumer's anthropomorphism of ai strikes me as more symptomatic than deliberate--though it definitely wouldn't surprise me if governments moved to ratify AI in a similar fashion to corporate personhood for whatever politically expedient purpose.
EXACTLY. Pardon the overly long comment upcoming, but you made me think of something that I find fascinating—
There’s a corollary to — and support for — your point here, too, in that somebody could ALSO easily just become a very unfulfilled mess of a person if they even DID “ai-off-load” SUBSISTENCE-labor rather than wage labor.
Like, the primacy of “making more art” in the quote you sample— as the only thing we’d be doing if not working— feels like evidence that its author doesn’t understand labor in any other context than capitalism. It’s like she thinks that all the human body and mind unshackled from capitalism can be used for is intellectual pursuits. And that kinda reeks of western-enlightenment/cartesian-dualism kind of stuff, to me at least.
And to be clear, intellectual pursuits ARE important pursuits, but they’re not the ONLY ones worth spending time on, whether when living with wage-labor as a reality or not.
Yes, discounting manual labor as unworthy of “humans” not only suggests that those who DO end up tasked with that work are deemed “less than,” but it also might suggest that exerting oneself in endeavors OTHER THAN those considered more “high class” and therefore, arguably, more self-satisfied and entitled to praise (e.g; “art,” entertainment) are not worthy of us either.
But that attitude really doesn’t seem to engage with anthropological history as it regards how humans have spent their time/WITH whom for the vast majority of human history/before the advent of industrial-civilization.
Hell, plenty of indigenous people (apropos enough, a demographic over represented in the same socio-economic pool singled-out by implication when devaluing WAGED manual labor, if/when they get pulled into the capitalist system) have survived and continue to survive by way of subsistence labor to varying degrees; growing/foraging for/hunting a fair amount of their own food, building their own housing, etc. And that is usually something done as a divided-labor task; sure, every person might have a different role that they’re good at and stick with, BUT that doesn’t DEVALUE the other people’s roles by default. Just because you’re “an artist” and therefore “smart” doesn’t mean the carpenter or the gardener is lowly by comparison or “not smart.”
The point is not that the “hand work” is somehow more dignified or more “close to nature” than that of the mind, inherently (another basis for unhelpful myths about “noble savages” and whatnot)— but rather that intellectual subsistence labor (e.g: communal-bonding labor like setting up spiritual ceremonies) and physical subsistence labor (e.g: sourcing the food that those worshippers eat) cannot exist without each other. You can’t separate the manual from the intellectual because the people who are good at each NEED each other to survive.
Even if/when we live in a world where free-market relations no longer exist— there is still required a basic respect for each other’s roles. To sound annoyingly grad-school about it, a “dialectic “ is certainly present there!
Rugged individualism and the myth of “the lone genius” will leave you isolated, skill-less, or both: unable to enjoy your 21st century luxuries because you’ve devalued the workforce needed to sustain it so much that they’ll all get replaced by robots who do the job shittily; and/or unable to live in a collective fashion with others who happen to have different skills than you, because you’re too busy thinking you’re better than them to realize that you need each other.
Oof.
Your comment does very well to build on what I only reductively named as “(corporate) obsession with convenience” but also contends with the common maxim of "I do not dream of labour."
I believe artists need experience outside of art to make good art. That even trickles down to something as small as doing housework. Personally, cleaning helps me with art so immensely that actually, my next album is an ode to the practices of cleanliness. I digress.
Perhaps the reasons why technological advancements of the Western world feel so vacuous because their progression is have been overly concerned with maximising convenience when, in art specifically, friction is such an integral part of the creation--not in some divine and idealised way but simply as the fertile ground for transformation.
The formulaic music many describe as an ear-sore is simply music without friction, a closely followed recipe with no extra personality. Civilisationally, we've reached a point where a beautiful voice isn't enough--perhaps because beautiful voices aren't, say, forged in the crucible of a gospel church and then transitioned into a music career. No, the beautiful voice nowadays is raised to only to be a beautiful voice, ergo the voice and the polish of the musical composition isn't enough because all of the components align so straightly that they feel like they lack a soul.
It is all definitely reminiscent of western-enlightenment/cartesian-dualism, which probably is advent of where we began to understand ourselves as machinery. Thus, art becomes more and more machine-like, especially as divorce further from things that made us feel in tune with nature (religion, tactile labour, etc). I much prefer to understand creativity as a garden. A watering can just works. A branch trimmer just works. Sunlight just works. Find the best sunlight spot for the plant. Give it water. Protect it from bugs that may eat it (or don't! bugs need homes, too). Give it a haircut if it gets unruly.
We are the same way so I agree with you, in short: the artist should do dishes just as much as the cleaners should dabble in crafts. If they want!
I hadn't considered the way that the pithy statement (having AI do the dishes) shows an inherent disdain or dismissal of those who do that work, but it's a great point! it also makes me think about how there's a lot of white western media that includes fantasies about having servants in different ways (like Bridgerton and the way that the lifestyles of the main characters are subsidized by the labor of hundreds if not thousands of people). I believe that Inigo has also previously used the term "responsibility abandonment" to describe this tendency or yearning of white people and wealthy people to wish to never have to do anything we don't want to - which is honestly pretty childish!
I enjoy all your work, but I am just LOVING your pieces on AI- so bloody good. Thank you for this
Thanks Rebecca! I suspect I have a couple more AI takes in me
The jobs people often want AI to go for first are the ones held by those already marginalized in some way or another - financially, socially, emotionally. There is dignity in all types of work, but capitalism has detracted from some of those feelings and created contempt and ire in its place, as you write. Walzer's book Spheres of Justice has a whole chapter dedicated to Hard Work. Not hard work like jobs that are demanding physically or mentally, but work that is hard because it is dirty or not-often-wanted. Dishwashing, sanitation, some agricultural jobs -- these get offloaded by capitalistic societies onto individuals the capitalistic system wishes to (or whoever is easiest to) marginalize. In the case of the US, the prime example is immigrants. This creates a dissonance where politicians work to get immigrants out, yet uphold systems that cannot function without their presence. You can't deport everyone -- things would fall apart. But they try to push up to that line.
Walzer proposes instead a system that would probably be impossible to implement, but nonetheless is inspiring in its idealism: that these jobs should be drafted for like military positions and worked through as a rotation in society. Either you work these jobs as a conscripted service from 18-24, or people move in and out of the work for a week or two at a time, then going back to their original jobs. Doing this attempts to return a sense of dignity to the work, and also builds in feelings of respect for those that work the jobs full time by allowing opportunities for empathy. As I said, no way this happens (anytime soon). But it fills you with hope to think about, doesn't it?
loved your recent pieces on AI and capitalism...of course capitalism will love and promote AI at the expense of humans. it makes financial sense. ergo...
And yet! I see so many foaming at the mouth to use AI and the thing that strikes me is how desensitised we've become about our own involvement. I think we feel complicit in so many evils just by breathing that we're unable or unwilling to take principled stances if it means eschewing convenience. We are not willing to risk sacrificing the crumb of cheese we've been allowed to have.
the worst thing is that we are barely given the choice not to use it. its just been freely inserted into everything with no thought about implications other than for rhe unaccountable corporate interests for whom its effectively just another money harvesting optimisation tool.
this is such a good point! makes me think of talking with an older (retired) family member about how they don't want to support Jeff Bezos by shopping at Amazon but "it's just so convenient" - and I was like, yes, I know, that's literally how they get you- you (family member) have the time and resources to be slightly inconvenienced though! it's not even that hard 😔
AI is being forced on it and it is so difficult to resist bc it is showing up in what we consider basic every day activity. The word ChatGPT sends chills up my spine. It is a good thing that I am not a worrier bc there is much to worry about. From Jobs to relationships to being allowed to be human. Thank you for speaking about it.
i wonder if the anthropomorphizing of AI comes from a desire to offload the mechanisms of human emotion onto machines so we can make society into even more of an inhumane wasteland devoid of empathy, or maybe they're setting up for some sort of legal rights for AI systems just in case their science fiction/ketamine dreams of conscious machines comes to term
i think consumer's anthropomorphism of ai strikes me as more symptomatic than deliberate--though it definitely wouldn't surprise me if governments moved to ratify AI in a similar fashion to corporate personhood for whatever politically expedient purpose.