I don\u2019t need to tell you that people hate AI. The list of grievances is long: slop, cheating, bias, enfeeblement, electricity bills, environmental destruction, exploitation, theft, cybercrime, doom. But resistance to the technology has often taken the form of shaming people for personally using it, with precious little organizing against the companies building the machines. This is perplexing, given that those companies are attempting to render us obsolete.<\/p>\n
The executives may contest this framing, offering some bromides about how AI will augment human work or how we\u2019ll simply find new jobs to do. But their clear goals are to create systems that so clearly surpass our abilities that we will have little hope of competing.<\/p>\n
OpenAI defines<\/a> its north star of artificial general intelligence (AGI) as \u201ca highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work\u201d. And the Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, writes<\/a>: \u201cAI isn\u2019t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.\u201d<\/p>\n The industry\u2019s ultimate ambition, what it calls AGI, is better understood as a universal labor-replacing machine. These systems would be able to do any work a human could do from a remote desk \u2013 leaving livelihoods safe to the extent a human touch is preferred, a physical presence is required, or the jobs themselves are legally protected.<\/p>\n You may doubt that the industry will ever succeed in its perverse quest, but we should agree that it shouldn\u2019t even be allowed to try.<\/p>\n We should freeze<\/a> frontier AI development \u2013 that is, the effort to build AGI, and only resume<\/a> the work when there is strong public buy-in and broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably.<\/p>\n But realizing this commonsense ideal will require us to get organized enough to overcome the richest industry in history. And that means changing the way we think about AI.<\/p>\n In many corners of the internet, especially on the left, people pride themselves on never touching the stuff \u2013 while simultaneously making bold, deeply mistaken claims about its nature and capabilities.<\/p>\n I understand the reluctance to give these companies your money, your data, your attention. But using what is increasingly an indispensable technology is not an endorsement of the industry building it, any more so than using Instagram to advocate for aggressive regulations on social media would be an endorsement of Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s toxic empire.<\/p>\n Moreover, the people using AI are going to outcompete the ones who don\u2019t, bending the world in their preferred direction, while forming a deeper understanding of the technology itself. Bosses will use Claude Code to replace workers, while the leftist policy analyst Matt Bruenig is having<\/a> it build a publicly accessible, automatically updating database of National Labor Relations Board decisions. If you\u2019re serious about your mission, you should use whichever tools work best.<\/p>\n Most importantly, anyone not seriously engaging with what the technology can already do \u2013 and might soon do \u2013 is ceding their seat at the table. Sixty-nine active members of Congress have publicly used<\/a> terms like artificial superintelligence, the Singularity and AI existential risk. If certain techies are the only people willing to acknowledge that the technology\u2019s capabilities have dramatically improved and could pose a species-level threat in the future, that\u2019s who concerned policymakers will disproportionately listen to.<\/p>\n The left\u2019s lack of engagement here is a real loss. Even non-leftists recognize it. Joshua Achiam, then OpenAI\u2019s chief futurist, declared<\/a>: \u201cThe left has completely abdicated their role in this discussion. A decade from now, this will be understood on the left to have been a generational mistake; perhaps even more than merely generational.\u201d<\/p>\n Dean Ball, who led the authorship of Trump\u2019s AI action plan before becoming an executive at OpenAI, declared<\/a>: \u201cJoshua is right.\u201d<\/p>\n You may be suspicious of political adversaries wishing you were more present in the arena, but they recognize that \u2013 on the technology\u2019s current course \u2013 this is an all-hands-on-deck situation. Indeed, we all need to reckon with the industry\u2019s race to replace us, but we especially need \u2013 and especially don\u2019t have \u2013 the left. We need organizers. We need people who can\u2019t help but think about power to teach the ones who never learned to. We need ambition. We need people who believe that better worlds are possible.<\/p>\n The popularity of stigmatizing individual AI usage has been a gift to the industry, fracturing would-be opponents and activating our identities as consumers. BP had to pay an ad agency to popularize<\/a> the \u201ccarbon footprint\u201d to shift the blame for climate change to individuals. When we think as consumers, the goal becomes minimizing our own complicity. We should instead think as citizens: how do we democratically govern this technology in the public interest?<\/p>\n Right now, AI is being governed by unelected, unaccountable tech billionaires, subject to intense pressures from shareholders and the Trump administration. To have any hope of changing this intolerable status quo, we\u2019ll need to build a movement powerful enough to defeat the richest industry in history.<\/p>\n In March, when I finished writing Obsolete<\/a>, the book this piece draws from, I predicted:<\/p>\n It won\u2019t be easy, but the ingredients are there for a mass movement unlike any the world has ever seen. Everyone has a stake in how AI develops \u2013 a reality that will become increasingly indisputable as the technology eats ever more of the world.<\/p>\n Since then, the dangers have appeared faster than I expected, but public awareness has grown even faster \u2013 making me feel more optimistic than ever. The AI story was never going to have a happy ending without deep and sustained engagement from the world, not just the tiny handful of people racing to build our replacements.<\/p>\n The big question is whether we can channel this new wave of concern into effective advocacy. Personally, I think the most promising place to start is at Irreplaceable.org<\/a>. (I serve on the non-profit board and am donating my share of the book\u2019s royalties to Irreplaceable.) Founded by veterans of the climate movement, Irreplaceable aims to meet people where they are, organize their anger into political power, and build a coalition strong enough to win democratic control over AI. The non-profit is organizing a national walkout<\/a> to Freeze AI on 20 October. Anyone can join one near them or host their own.<\/p>\n I have no illusions that a day of walkouts will solve our AI problems. But it will bring together people with shared concerns, and some of them will become the friendships that sustain successful movements. Most of all, we\u2019ll need to keep our eye on the ball: the companies trying to render us obsolete, not the friends and neighbors using their products.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I don\u2019t need to tell you that people hate AI. 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