AI (Artificial Intelligence) and the Trade Union Movement

 

On 10 December 2024 the International Workers Institute’s symposium on “Artificial Intelligence and the Trade Union Movement” was successfully held through Zoom. More than 90 trade unionists from 35 countries participated in the seminar.

The keynote speech was given by Cde. Grigoris Lionis, Dr. Mech. Engineering.

Below is the transcript of his keynote remarks.

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Artificial Intelligence and Trade Union Movement

Grigoris Lionis (Dr. Mech. Engineering)

The debate about the notorious artificial intelligence, AI, and its effects on humans, and in particular its effects on workers, is a debate that has recently flared up.

Almost every day, dozens of news and analyses about new developments in AI, new applications in production and how it can make people’s lives much better are brought to light.

And of course, the workers’ movement has to discuss this issue, to shed light on its aspects, to answer the questions raised, to anticipate the future developments.

Our discussion today aims to make a small contribution to this process, to trigger new thoughts and viewpoints.

Before we look deeper into the issue, and try to give some answers as to what AI really is and what its limits are, we have to start from the understanding that AI and its application in production is a reality and concerns practically all workers on the five continents.

The examples of how AI impacts the lives of workers around the world are numerous:

• In India, there are various announcements about AI call centers , their success rates and their ability to automatically handle the vast majority of calls.
• Brazil is promoting a major plan for the development of AI, which in addition to its use for “public services” is also related to industrial policy, with Minister Márcio Elias Rosa stating that the government’s goal is to “put AI inside the factories to make Brazil efficient and competitive”.
• In the US, AI applications are being used in an increasing number of companies in a growing number of industries, while the motto “bring production back to the US” is being utilized.
• The EU is moving forward with many new laws to regulate AI while “racing” to catch up with competition in its implementation in the production process.
• China is a world champion in the implementation of industrial robots.

And so on and so forth.

Hence, a number of questions are raised by the developments themselves.  What is AI and, above all, what can it do? How will work with AI evolve? Should we be technophobic or technophiles? What should the workers’ movement do in the age of AI? How can it be utilized for the benefit of the peoples, for the benefit of workers?

Much can be said about AI technology, but it is worth focusing on some facts that can promote the objectives of our discussion.

The term AI is more or less an umbrella term that encompasses many, different technologies and technical solutions, which nevertheless converge on one result: the AI function seems to replace human cognitive functions. Certain processes that until recently required a human mind to perform can now be performed by computer AI systems. The processes that are being automated relate both to activities that are mainly in the mental realm – e.g. translating a text from one language to another – and to activities in which mental functions control physical functions, such as driving a vehicle, or building a wall, which require not only physical strength, but also the ability to perform the tasks of the human brain: perception of the environment, understanding of the problems that the environment can “create”, choosing a different approach etc.

The older automation processes – automated industry, traditional robots – worked well in a standard environment, strictly defined, on a production line, and even there they had little room for flexibility, making their application feasible only in very large volume applications. AI “gives” these systems a much greater flexibility. After decades of development of such systems, mankind has managed to build systems that can now operate in such conditions, and replace humans in some of these operations.

These systems use huge computers, purpose-built for the job, and unlike traditional solutions they need to be “trained” with a very large amount of data, which are primarily human-generated.

In this sense, these systems actually have a social basis since their “intelligence” is, after all, nothing more than the “distillation” of the intelligence of the people with whose data these systems are trained. Simply put, the great language models that “speak”, in fact do nothing more than “parrot” relevant words and phrases, and compose sentences, paragraphs and texts that look like something they have already worked out. They have simply edited tens of millions of pages of text, which they practically remember all at once.

Thus these systems, always in their current version, do not “think”. They do not understand what they are saying. But they produce such complex responses that it seems as if they were thinking, as if they understood what is being said.

This is why their ability to replace humans altogether is currently non-existent.

However, these systems can – in the way they work – multiply the productivity of labour, in such a way that a significant reduction in the number of workers is allowed, as workers with AI systems perform tasks that were previously performed by many more workers. The recent example of a large call centre company revealing that automated call routing is used in 95% of calls is telling.

In the coming years, we can expect rapid development of many such technological systems that can perform processes with a significant reduction in manpower, from robotic drivers performing 90% – 95% of the journey, to robots in the industrial production process.

Will human labour be eliminated with these systems? Speaking of the medium-term future, the answer we give is a resounding NO. These systems lack awareness, judgment and the ability to understand and respond to truly unexpected developments.

However, the fact that the productivity of labour has soared with the use of such systems, which allow tasks to be carried out with a significantly smaller number of workers, is clear and beyond doubt.

Almost all studies assessing the impact of robots and AI on the workforce conclude that the adoption of robots leads to a loss of jobs in the industries that deploy them. In fact, these studies refer to “simple” robots that are already used in industry. The new robots operating with AI systems, which are coming in the near future with even greater capabilities, will have an objectively greater impact.

This phenomenon, of course, should not be surprising to anyone, and after all, it is not new. In every phase of development of new technological solutions, the new level of automation has been used to increase the productivity of labour and to replace human labour in one sector that was then transferred to other sectors.

Perhaps the most typical example is the example of agricultural production. Before the mechanization of agricultural production, the latter absorbed a very large part of the labour force almost all over the world. Mechanization, the automation of agricultural production, drastically reduced the need for labour force employed in it, and historically freed it up to go to other sectors of production.

The technical difference with AI possibly concerns the fact that the changes, the automation of production and the tendency to replace human labour concerns almost all sectors of the economy at the same time. The advent of AI does not concern one sector or another, but instead concerns all work sectors, or at least a wide range of them.

But above all, what influences the effects of the new technological means on work and human relations in general is the social structure itself, capital and the ownership of capital.

When studying the effects of new technological means on work, we should bear in mind that in capitalism, the means of production constitute capital. Capital is invested with the sole criterion of its self-expansion, its profit in simpler words. Thus, capital investment, the whole of investment in capitalism, is promoted on the basis of profit and the rate of profit. Investment is prioritized on the basis of the expected rate of profit. In other words, new means of production are developed and used according to the rate of profit.

In the area we are currently examining, in new technologies, AI and robotics, this observation explains how capitalism will use the new means of production and the increase in the productivity of labour. Investment in the new means of production occurs when the “cost” for the investor is reduced, i.e. when either the labour force required in the particular firm is reduced – and indeed when it is reduced enough to compensate for the increased investment – or when the new means of production expands market share, thereby reducing employment in other firms in the industry.

A relatively recent study carried out by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2020 found that each industrial robot installed in the US reduces – in the wider region – the workforce by 6 workers. The effect in other countries with a different economic structure may be different, but the fact is that investments of capital, i.e. the investments that capitalist states and companies make in robots and AI have the following effects: they replace human labour, reducing the number of jobs, while changing the jobs that remain, making work more complex, often longer, and, due to unemployment, they can even result in wage cuts for those who work.

Moreover, as we examine developments within the context of the capitalist mode of production and today within the context of monopoly capitalism, new investments in production automation, robots and AI have the potential to affect even geo-economic aspects of production. Some of the cheaper labour employed in developing regions of the world may be replaced by automated means of production in the richer, consumer regions. To give a simple example, an automated system that produces clothes, drastically reducing the need for direct labour, could lead to a significant removal of manpower from SE Asia, which is currently the “matrix” of garment and footwear industry.

Apart from the economy, these new technologies are also critical for political and military power. We see new technologies being used in the wars that NATO is waging around the globe, and this aspect is enough to shed light on the reasons why the US and NATO are trying to maintain their technological supremacy, while also using types of economic warfare against the BRICS and especially China.

The discussion so far seems to explain why the real question for the workers’ movement is not the dilemma of being technophobic or technophiles.

On the one hand, the problem is not technology, AI and robots. After all, they are nothing but results of social production itself, of accumulated human work experience codified as science, they are after all our own creations. All the more so since AI in particular encodes the very communication of millions or billions of people, i.e. it has a social character. Under the current circumstances, the conditions for the development and use of AI systems and new technologies in general are determined by the “masters of the earth”, the bourgeois classes and bourgeois states. Thus, there is no problem with new technologies as such. The problem is that today, and as long as capitalism exists, the exploitation of all these new technologies will be for the benefit of capital, it will be to ensure more profit and a larger rate of profit.

This course of development of the means of production and exploitation by capital means that new technologies, today will not be used to solve workers’ problems, but will objectively expand them.

• They will lead to deterioration in the working conditions of workers, to a reduction in employment and an increase in working hours.
• Their exploitation by the state makes the states more efficient in their operation, i.e. in heavy taxation of the people, in state repression and the surveillance of workers’ struggles.
• Their exploitation by imperialism produces new, even more dangerous weapons and leads to even greater power.

Thus, it is completely disorienting to think that the problems of the workers can be solved by new technology in the production process and in the country. New technologies are promoted with the criterion of increasing profits and the efficiency of the state, thus having a negative impact on workers. The forces, in politics and in the trade unions, which promote certain “technolutions” that put forward the position that more technology can be a basis for improving the lives of workers, are, consciously or unconsciously, cultivating illusions.

The real problem, then, is not whether we are deniers or whether we favour technology. Technology is not the problem. The problem is the economic relations in which it is developed and exploited.

We are positive that new technologies have the potential, in a radically different social and economic context, in the context of socialist relations, to play a very important role for the benefit of workers.

In a society free of profit and capitalist ownership, where production is developed to meet the expanded needs of the working people, new technologies, robotics, AI can be exploited with drastically positive results.

In production per se, new technologies, robotics, automation will be developed and exploited to substantially lessen human toil, to make tasks simpler for humans, and will lead to a rapid reduction of the working time, while improving the standard of living and the level of consumption.

At the same time, in terms of social organization, new technologies and artificial intelligence can offer major advances in scientific central planning, allowing problems that were previously much more difficult to solve to be tackled.

The possibilities of forecasting consumption can much better align production with needs, the possibilities of managing large volumes of multiplying data will greatly assist the scientific central planning of socialism to solve complex production problems.

New technologies will be used to assist education and health care services by increasing their efficiency and not as a cheap substitute for the popular strata as is the case today.

After all, the current enormous potential of the new means of production reflects nothing other than the same, ever deepening social division of labour, its social character. The new productive forces “cry out” for the need to change the relations of production, they cry out that capitalist relations are now more mature than ever. They cry out for the need for socialism.

Today, the workers’ movement must move forward using its economic theory as a beacon. It must move forward with a clear understanding of the effect of the means of production on labour and on the balance of power.

To realize that both sides that bourgeois propaganda highlights are equally ineffective.

Robots and AI are not “demons” to be exorcised, technology is not the problem.

At the same time, the exploitation of robots and AI by the state and capital will not solve our problems in the workplace, in society, instead it will multiply them. The advent of robots and AI does not make “the economy” better in general, it just benefits the capitalists to whom they belong.

Under the current circumstances, the international workers’ movement must fight and oppose the capitalist laws that seek to exploit the new technologies at the expense of the workers.

To elaborate a framework of demands that lights up the social reality, to explain that it is not technology but the capitalist owner that is the problem, to anticipate in good time the impact of new technologies in the various sectors and in their country. The need to drastically reduce working time while increasing workers’ wages and improving working conditions must be at the epicentre of their struggles. These struggles today will also pave the way for the great social changes that workers around the world need.

 

https://www.theoryandpraxis.eu/ai-trade-union-movement-documents-materials-from-the-iwi-symposium