Perspective: The trouble with AI isn’t that it’s new. It’s that it will trigger a very old process of the latest technology transforming good jobs into bad ones.
Since the 19th century, employers have used machines to transform relatively well-paid skilled work — like weaving and butchering — into poorly paid, ostensibly “unskilled” jobs. Employers used machines to break up these crafts and free themselves from their dependence on more expensive and powerful craft workers. They called this mechanization.
Forced to bargain with unionized workers by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, a law ordering employers to recognize labor unions, Ford — a company notoriously hostile to unionization — used the idea of automation to question the principle of organized industrial workers in the widespread technological enthusiasm of the postwar period. Executives blamed technological progress for the effects of their decision to speed up production and degrade job classifications.
Workers complained of management speeding them up, breaking up their job classifications and moving work to the South, in an attempt to weaken the union and to obscure the continuing presence — and value — of human labor still on the line.Human beings still labored, but now they did so under worsening conditions. “Automation has not reduced the drudgery of labor,” wrote one Chrysler line-worker.
Beginning in the 1950s, American office managers began introducing electronic digital computers to office work in the hopes of doing the same thing to white-collar workers that it had to automobile workers on the assembly line. The computer’s promise for employers was that it would break up and cheapen the skilled work of secretaries and office clerks.
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