"I’ve been a freelance journalist for 10 years, usually writing for magazines and websites about cinema. I presented a morning show on Radio Kraków twice a week for about two years. It was only one part of my work, but I really enjoyed it. It was about culture and cinema, and featured a range of people, from artists to activists. I remember interviewing Ukrainians about the Russian invasion for the first programme I presented, back in 2022.

I was let go in August 2024, alongside a dozen co-workers who were also part-time. We were told the radio station was having financial problems. I was relatively OK with it, as I had other income streams. But a few months later I heard that Radio Kraków was launching programmes hosted by three AI characters. Each had AI-generated photographs, a biography and a specific personality. They called it an “experiment” aimed at younger audiences.

One of the first shows they did was a live “interview” with Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, winner of the 1996 Nobel prize for literature, who had died 12 years earlier. What are the ethics of using the likeness of a dead person? Szymborska is a symbol of Polish intellectual culture, so it caused outrage. I couldn’t understand it: radio is created by people for other people. We cannot replace our experiences, emotions or voices with avatars."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/31/the-workers-who-lost-their-jobs-to-ai-chatgpt?CMP=share_btn_url

I used to think the point of #life was to be happy and healthy until I discovered #Capitalism

"Across twenty meticulous chapters, Braverman explored the process by which capitalists siphoned value out of their workers. This extraction splintered the human being. Body was torn from mind; motions became mechanical; knowledge was locked away in business suites. Here was “the degradation of work in the twentieth century,” as Braverman’s subtitle had it. But alongside degradation ran a second process. As workers were automated out of industrial production, capital furrowed its way into other realms of life. Factories gave way to offices, the coppersmith to the clerk, and then to sprawling postindustrial economies of services and care. The genius of Labor and Monopoly Capital was to narrate these two developments together. Capital reconstituted itself over and over in an endless cycle. But in so doing it created new worlds of labor, a molten working class.

Half a century after its publication, Labor and Monopoly Capital remains a classic. It has sold over one hundred thousand copies and continues to inform studies of capital, labor, and class. But it has also been subject to partial or plainly incorrect assessments. Many have reduced Braverman to the “deskilling thesis” — the idea that capitalism linearly forces workers to perform ever-simpler and more menial labor — when in fact he insisted that this was too simple a claim. Others have accused him of a wistful nostalgia for artisanal labor, when in fact Braverman countered that objection in his introduction (although this is a point to which we will return). Worst of all, despite its impressive reach in radical circles, Labor and Monopoly Capital has been ignored by mainstream historians of capitalism and dismissed by many sociologists of labor. (With some important exceptions: for instance, the labor historian David Montgomery and many of his students.) The feeling was mutual, though."

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/braverman-labor-monopoly-capital-legacy

China Miéville has summarized in a few words what should be said about immigration in the West. Anything deviating from this agenda is total crap, in other words, intellectual bullshit made up by hypocrites. If we want to strive for more Democracy, then we should focus on what's really important: A general democratic deficit when it comes to all political and economic issues.

"Anderson says that voters have usually not been consulted about ‘either the arrival or the scale of labour from abroad’. But then, after decades of neoliberalism, what are voters usually consulted about? And on what policies do their opinions have an effect? There is no democratic mandate for almost anything: pouring shit into rivers; declining real wages; the financialisation of public goods; skyrocketing inequality; the destruction of the universities; the underfunding of hospitals; and so endlessly on. To demand that the left should concern itself with the lack of democratic accountability tout court would be welcome, if hardly innovative.
(...)
On immigration, socialist demands should include full labour and civic rights for migrants, full entitlement to benefits, unionisation across the economy, and an undoing of vulnerabilities that contribute to the super-exploitation of migrants.

Clearly immigration is distinct insofar as it is a highly effective wedge issue for the right. And that is something the left must indeed diagnose and confront. But Anderson takes the framing of the ‘problem of immigration’ as a starting point. Which is either to tail the right, or to accept its propaganda."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n07/letters

It's #always the #butt #kisser.

"The problems of integrating AI into our businesses, our lives, and our society are indeed complicated. But whether you call it “AI native” or “AI first,” it does not mean embracing the cult of “economic efficiency” that reduces humans to a cost to be eliminated.

No, it means doing more, using humans augmented with AI to solve problems that were previously impossible, in ways that were previously unthinkable, and in ways that make our machine systems more attuned to the humans they are meant to serve. As Chelsea said, we are called to integrate AI into “a more advanced, more contextually aware, and more communally oriented” sensibility. AI first puts humans first."

https://www.oreilly.com/radar/ai-first-puts-humans-first/

"The robots generally haven’t displaced humans; Amazon said it has hired hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers since their introduction, while creating many new skilled roles. But the robots have increased the number of items each worker can pick to hundreds from dozens an hour.
(...)
The Amazon engineers said this transition was on their minds as the company urged them to rely more on A.I. They said that, while doing so was technically optional, they had little choice if they wanted to keep up with their output goals, which affect their performance reviews.

The expectations have sped up rapidly. One engineer said that building a feature for the website used to take a few weeks; now it must frequently be done within a few days. He said this is possible only by using A.I. to help automate the coding and by cutting down on meetings with colleagues to solicit feedback and explore alternative ideas. (A second engineer said her efficiency gains from using A.I. were more modest; Amazon has more than 10,000 software engineers and different teams use the tools more or less intensively.)

The new approach to coding at many companies has, in effect, eliminated much of the time the developer spends reflecting on his or her work. “It used to be that you had a lot of slack because you were doing a complicated project — it would maybe take a month, maybe take two months, and no one could monitor it,” Dr. Katz said. “Now, you have the whole thing monitored, and it can be done quickly.”

As at Microsoft, many Amazon engineers use an A.I. assistant that suggests lines of code. But the company has more recently rolled out A.I. tools that can generate large portions of a program on its own. One engineer called the tools “scarily good.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/business/amazon-ai-coders.html

#AI #GenerativeAI AICoding #AIAssistants #Automation #LLMs #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment #Alienation #WageSlavery #ClassWarfare

"The strong interpretation of this graph is that it’s exactly what one would expect to see if firms replaced young workers with machines. As law firms leaned on AI for more paralegal work, and consulting firms realized that five 22-year-olds with ChatGPT could do the work of 20 recent grads, and tech firms turned over their software programming to a handful of superstars working with AI co-pilots, the entry level of America’s white-collar economy would contract. The chaotic Trump economy could make things worse. Recessions can accelerate technological change, as firms use the downturn to cut less efficient workers and squeeze productivity from whatever technology is available. And even if employers aren’t directly substituting AI for human workers, high spending on AI infrastructure may be crowding out spending on new hires.

Luckily for humans, though, skepticism of the strong interpretation is warranted. For one thing, supercharged productivity growth, which an intelligence explosion would likely produce, is hard to find in the data. For another, a New York Fed survey of firms released last year found that AI was having a negligible effect on hiring. Karin Kimbrough, the chief economist at LinkedIn, told me she’s not seeing clear evidence of job displacement due to AI just yet. Instead, she said, today’s grads are entering an uncertain economy where some businesses are so focused on tomorrow’s profit margin that they’re less willing to hire large numbers of entry-level workers, who “often take time to learn on the job.”"

https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/04/job-market-youth/682641/

Pointing out that we've been #exploiting #Chinese #WageSlavery is NOT - I repeat - NOT dick riding the #CPC - or felating #China as a whole.

In fact, it should be #market #theory at this point, that no nation can compete against the cost cutting of either indirect or direct #slavery, that the idea of #FreeMarket existing under the same conditions is absurd.

Why did we do this? To avoid #union demands in the #50s and #60s, by tapping into an unethical #LaborMarket of an #authoritarian #regime.