💼 Why 'Will AI take your job?' is the wrong question.

PLUS: An update from The Facilitation Leadership Lab

Hi there, and welcome back to Untangled, a newsletter and podcast about technology, people, and power. Last week, I wrote about the concept of emergence and how AI chatbots are really just knowledge sausages — give it a read to understand what on earth I mean by that. If you share it with your network and get folks to subscribe, you can get access to the paid edition of Untangled for free.

Okay, before getting into this week’s issue, I wanted to share an update from the Facilitation Leadership Lab. Kate and I will soon launch our first skills workshop focused on managing conflict. It will take place Saturday, August 19th from 1-4 pm EST, so mark your calendars, and fill out this survey to be the first to hear when enrollments happen.

We’ve all been in meetings that are hijacked by conflict and challenging personalities. By the end of this workshop, you’ll be able to navigate complex group dynamics and successfully mediate conflict to help any group — your team, your organization, or your client — realize their purpose.

We’ll share a lot more about the workshop in the coming weeks. For now, click the li’l button below, and imagine what it will be like to never let group conflict and challenging personalities get in the way of a successful meeting again.

Now, on to the show.

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Who has recently read a news article predicting that AI will take white-collar jobs? Or that “AI will destroy jobs” or “the laptop class.” Yeah, me too. According to Google search, AI is coming for our jobs — and Will Smith, apparently. But “Will AI take your job” is the wrong question to ask. Let’s apply The Untangled Checklist and see how we might reframe this question, shall we? (For new subscribers, The Checklist is a special issue I wrote a few months back that you can use to analyze any news narrative.)

One tip from The Checklist is to replace “AI” with “decisions a company made.” Right, “AI” doesn’t have agency — it can’t take anything. This isn’t me being fussy about words — it matters. Situating ‘AI’ as the actor in the sentence obfuscates the power of companies to make decisions about whether and how to use these tools. It replaces their responsibilities with a technological trend, as if its effects are pre-determined. At this point, we might rewrite the question “Will AI take your job?” to “How might the decisions corporate leaders make regarding AI impact your job?”

But even this question isn’t quite right — “AI” isn’t a technical object, it’s a sprawling socio-technical assemblage of people, power, culture, and technology. Back to The Checklist! In it, I wrote, “As you interact with technologies throughout the day, think about the people who helped design and develop them.” “AI” is inseparable — some might say ‘entangled’ — with the humans completing myriad small tasks that make it work. Josh Dzieza’s recent piece,” AI is a lot of work,” makes this point exceedingly clear. He wrote about all of the often invisiblized labor behind “AI” — the annotator who turns raw images into data sets used to train AI systems, those classifying TikTok videos, people labeling food so smart refrigerators don’t misidentify packaging, etc. The piece is worth reading in full, but his argument is straightforward:

You might miss this if you believe AI is a brilliant, thinking machine. But if you pull back the curtain even a little, it looks more familiar, the latest iteration of a particularly Silicon Valley division of labor, in which the futuristic gleam of new technologies hides a sprawling manufacturing apparatus and the people who make it run.

Okay, now the question looks something like this: how might the decisions corporate leaders make regarding a sprawling socio-technical assemblage of people and technology impact your job?” Rolls right off the tongue!

Now we’ve come to the last phrase, “impact your job,” which requires that we get a handle on the relationship between technology and labor. We assume a story that goes something like this: emerging technologies increase efficiency, which improves productivity, and that leads to societal progress. This is a linear and causal story, but the relationship between technology and labor is much weirder and circuitous than that. Thank goodness The Checklist asks us to interrogate the assumptions and consequences of efficiency!