The hype cycle around automation and AI is at a fever pitch right now, encompassing everything from Amazon robots with a human-like grasp to the idea of “robot” lawyers.

But as machines, physical or algorithmic, infiltrate the American workplace, the nation’s workers — and the labor unions representing them — want to make sure human interests take precedence over abstract notions of AI-assisted “efficiency.”

Last week at CES I spoke with Amanda Ballantyne, the director of the AFL-CIO’s Technology Institute, who described how the past few years’ increased focus on American-made tech and manufacturing has been a salutary development for workers. But that’s not all labor wants. America’s major unions want to have a say in how new technologies are developed and implemented, with a mind toward incorporating feedback from the workers who actually have to work alongside their new robot colleagues.

“People who develop technology, maybe in a lab they think it’s going to work perfectly, but I can give you some examples of where technology has been introduced [into a workplace where] they clearly did not consult with people who actually do the job, and it's been a quasi-, if not full, disaster,” said D. Taylor, president of the hospitality union UNITE HERE.

Taylor pointed to hotel booking software that automated the guest checkout process but threw the housekeeping process into disarray, sending employees to various rooms in a decidedly time-wasting manner. It’s a complaint that winds through the discourse around AI development: the decision-making process around how new technologies are implemented is perhaps more important than the underlying tech itself, a line of thinking that also helped inform the Biden administration’s AI bill of rights blueprint.

“There’s a set of really deep set of labor movement issues involved in just ensuring that algorithmic management systems actually follow the law, that there's openness, accountability, and a worker’s voice in the way that those systems are implemented,” Ballantyne told me, referring specifically to the kinds of algorithms that don’t just do various jobs, but track workers’ movements, set their hours and perform various other kinds of boss-like tasks.

Given that the fundamental raison d’être for the labor movement is negotiating with bosses, human or otherwise, it makes sense that the sector is pushing for a say in how these futuristic technologies are deployed. That’s led to initiatives like the Technology Institute that Ballantyne heads, which she describes as an effort not to put the reins on tech in the workplace, but to put human-conscious guardrails in place around it.

“We have good and bad technology,” Ballantyne said. “There’s technology that improves work for working people, and then there's technology that automates and de-skills, and if there's no plan to help workers navigate that then we have job loss and inequity.”

Ballantyne pointed to the CHIPS and Science Act that passed last year as a major step in the right direction when it comes to building a more worker-focused tech infrastructure, citing its funding for the National Science Fund’s workforce-minded Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships directorate.

“This is an opportunity for us to bring real workers into research and development at scale,” Ballantyne said of the program, which will both bring scientists onto shop floors and union members into research laboratories. “The researchers will have access to workers who understand at a ground level, what's good and bad about how technology works, which ends up creating better technology.”

Pretty much everyone agrees that the government’s aging digital infrastructure is in desperate need of a makeover.

On the conservative American Enterprise Institute’s blog yesterday, nonresident senior fellow Jim Harper made an acidic case that ground zero for this effort should be the legislative process itself. Harper, taking umbrage with a suggestion from a New York Times reporter that House conservatives’ demand for more time devoted to reading and debating legislation was unreasonable, proposes a simple solution: automate (part of) the process, using the XML data that accompanies most legislation.

“XML in congressional legislation can—and sometimes does—identify what existing statutes a bill would amend. It can identify what agencies a bill would affect. It can articulate references to locations: cities, states, government facilities, national parks, and so on. It can even convey where bills authorize spending or appropriate funds and how much,” Harper writes, arguing for the revival of a project he built at the Cato Institute that made that XML more easily accessible to the public.

He cites former President Barack Obama’s (broken) campaign pledge to wait five days before signing any bill to give the public time to review it, pitching the project as a bipartisan one, albeit while acknowledging Congress’ decidedly partisan tone: “Perhaps giving a restart to computer-aided transparent government would allow a national government in the United States that actually operates consistent with democratic ideals. That would be good even if the authors of reform are, to some minds, horrible and stupid.”

The company responsible for the popular Bored Ape NFTs might soon have to face some uncomfortable questions in court.

A bit of crucial context for a weird, ongoing saga: For more than a year, the provocateur and conceptual artist Ryder Ripps has been accusing Bored Ape creators Yuga Labs of deliberately embedding Nazi rhetoric and imagery in their art. That, along with his own line of art parodying Yuga Labs’, earned him a lawsuit from the company for false advertisement and copyright infringement.

In a somewhat ironic turn of events, however, Ripps’ lawyers will now have the opportunity to depose Yuga Labs’ founders on those very accusations — after a judge on Monday dismissed the company’s motion to immunize them from said deposition. Those founders, who referred to Ripps as a “demented troll” in a June Medium post responding to the “insanely far-fetched” allegations of racism, will now for better or worse have to enter their denial into the legal record.

• What if the appeal of many AI tools is simply one to our narcissism?
• Good luck to the lawyers attempting to recover value from SBF’s $1 billion Kazakh Bitcoin investment.
• Ferrari is the latest sports-world company to break up with crypto.
• What will the rollout of AI audiobook narrators mean for the industry?
• Bill Gates fielded questions big, small, and loopy for his 11th Reddit AMA.

Stay in touch with the whole team: Ben Schreckinger ([email protected]); Derek Robertson ([email protected]); Steve Heuser ([email protected]); and Benton Ives ([email protected]). Follow us @DigitalFuture on Twitter.

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