Daniel (00:01.752)
Brian Merchant, welcome to the show.
Brian (00:03.9)
thanks so much for having me.
Daniel (00:06.2)
You know, I recently just finished your book, Blood in the Machine, and I just had to talk to you. I I saw that book. I walked into, you know, like your typical big bookstore where I normally am extremely overwhelmed by all the things I want to read, but I really zeroed in on that book when I saw the cover. And when I saw what the topic was, I thought, man, I've been saying for so many years, well, I'm not a Luddite. And I was like, I should find out. Maybe I am one.
But anyway, before we get into that, tell us a little bit about your career, the books you've written and the work that you do.
Brian (00:40.09)
Yeah, well, first of all, I'm glad to see it still out in the wild and sending up that sirens call getting the machine breaker curious crowd to draw in. Yeah, it's pretty great cover there that they did. So I'm pleased with that. Yeah, you know, I've been a tech journalist for, I don't know, it's 15 years, depending on how you count it. So I've been around the block. I've seen a lot of changes in
the industry in Silicon Valley and how we use technologies. I really kind of cut my teeth way back when at Vice Media, we started a tech publication called Motherboard there, where we kind of looked at tech from a bleeding edge, critical angle, or we tried to anyways, and we kind of got in the trenches and tried to ask some questions that a lot of people.
weren't asking at the time because if for those of your listeners who were around in the 2000s, kind of the pre 2010 and early 2010s era, it was all sort of sunshine and roses, right? Google's gonna, you know, not be evil, don't be evil. Apple is, you know, putting a dent in the universe and Steve Jobs is this mess, Ionic figure. And so, you know, we as as vice kind of,
tried to do at its best was to sort of poke around at the darker side. I give us credit for being a little bit earlier to the block on seeing some of those trends taking shape. you know, we did a lot of reporting on Amazon and Uber and that kind of thing. And then that led me to my first book, which was kind of looking at the iPhone, not just from a lens of the product demos.
Cupertino and what Apple and Steve Jobs were saying about the products, but how it's actually getting built, you know, how miners in Bolivia are contributing to the supply chain, how factory workers in Shenzhen and China are, you know, working around the clock to give us these devices. Like, what's the whole picture? And then that kind of led me on to the next step where I started thinking about this book.
Brian (03:04.376)
it really kind of, you know, pushed me further and further. The kind of the more you learn, the more dirty secrets you realize are kind of out there. Or even sometimes they're not even secrets. They're just not being talked about for a variety of reasons. And so I embarked on Blood in the Machine. And around that time, I also kind of became the tech columnist at the LA Times where I worked for a while. And yeah, I did this book and I've been
really kind of focused on issues about, I guess you could call it modern day ledism, know, thinking about who technology serves and who it exploits and which workers get impacted by tech. And now with AI, that's kind of the million dollar question, right?
Daniel (03:50.21)
Well, your book, if I understand it, came out in 2023, the Luddite book. And I would imagine in just this short period of time that's elapsed since the publication, this has moved so fast and so far already. I mean, because toward the end of the book, you do mention chat GPT, I think at one point, but I mean, it wasn't really in the wild the way it is now. And I know just in the last year, I'm watching my friends have relationships with artificial intelligence.
Brian (03:54.01)
Right. Yeah.
Brian (04:12.433)
Yeah.
Daniel (04:20.21)
and and use it as a augmentation for their minds. And they're all acting like it's not a big deal. And they'll say to me things like, it's not even that good. I'm like, it just came out last year, dude. Like, it's what do mean? It's not that good. It's pretty good. But, but you know, now you've got I'm sure in LA, I know I've got friends who are just in California sending me video of them in a self driving taxi. So this stuff's all happening now. So I do want to kind of go back into the book. But I'm just curious, since you wrote it,
It must have been just a flood of things that have revealed how prophetic and timely the book was.
Brian (04:57.368)
Yeah, as I was kind of hinting at. was, you know, AI was a little bit more nebulous. It was a little bit more abstract. People were talking about AI 10 years ago, 15 years ago. People have been talking about AI for like 50 or 60 years, but it hadn't reached this sort of level of cultural saturation and sort of mass economic investment and sort of this concentration that now is in so inescapable today.
In fact, it was just, as you said, of sort of tying itself together. was just taking up steam. was just picking up steam there. And I was...
Daniel (05:36.206)
Sauron was still building his body while the minions were burning all the trees.
Brian (05:38.524)
Yeah, he was still, that's right. Yeah, he was still in Mordor, just kind of like gleaming eyes in the dark shadows. But no, was, I was really looking at Amazon and Uber and sort of the gig work economy, which I think is a useful way of kind of thinking about what's happening with AI and we'll get into all this stuff, I'm sure, and what the companies want to do with AI.
Daniel (05:44.014)
you
Brian (06:05.244)
In sort of like the last step of the evolutionary phase, right? So we have, you know, Uber and this model for the 2010s, a lot of the startup mania was over this Uber for X, right? You know, we're gonna connect you through this algorithm to a worker that's gonna perform a function for you. And we're gonna...
make it cheaper than the taxis you'd normally take or the carpenter you'd normally hire or do all this and we're going to sort of connect them through this platform. And you know, now of course, AI is saying, oh no, no, promise is we're going to just do it all together. Like the AI is going to do everything, right? We're not going to connect you to that person that we're going to pay less. We're just going to do it all. So I was really looking at some of the, you know, the conditions in Amazon warehouses and the organizing that was going on there. I was looking at Uber's
drivers who are watching their rates fall as the company kind of ticked up its algorithm to try to ensure profitability. then sort of write as the book, you finish a book and it doesn't come out for a year. And so you kind of have to, I had to like bug my editors, actually look, this AI stuff is really happening. Can I get a little line or two in here? they begrudgingly let you change some things.
But that's to say, I think that the tendencies in the industry have been the same and you can kind of identify where they were going and what the, again, what the companies were hoping to do and what the pitch of AI has been largely. If you look at, know, again, the gig work model and sort of the social media giants that really took power over the last 10 years. And so when the AI stuff started happening, I was...
not really surprised by the form that it took or the attitude that the companies were espousing or the investment, but the speed by which it just came to completely dominate the sort of the cultural and economic conversation was pretty fascinating, was pretty surprising.
Daniel (08:13.432)
You know, I'm in television, so I host a TV show and then also I have a nutritional supplement company. And in both fields, I would love to say, hey, we're just not going to use this. But I mean, it's already it's, it's very difficult, especially when you have teams of editors and advertisers and things like that. I mean, they're just in those tools already. And I saw something the other day that said since
Brian (08:25.232)
Yeah, that is an option to you. Yeah, I mean, it is an option to you.
Daniel (08:42.144)
implementing the AI summaries in Google that the I think it's a 99 1 % of users click through to websites now, which means I mean, no incentive for people to even put content into websites anymore. If you know, no one's gonna visit those sites. And so, I mean, it's just, like I said, I don't have chat GPT. But every time I Google, I find myself checking that summary. And now I'm starting to ask questions instead of just search.
Brian (09:01.062)
Yeah. Yeah.
Brian (09:08.878)
Yeah. yeah. No, we, yeah, no, we are in this and that speaks to a number of different phenomena, right? It's, it speaks to just how thoroughly that the tech giants have sort of consolidated control over our digital lives and our, so this, I think the AI boom also doesn't happen to the speed and extent that it does. If we don't have this sort of level of corporate consolidation when Google can just say,
you know, 90 % of the world uses Google search as their search tool. We're putting Google AI overview on it and now you have no choice. so every now and they say, you know, there's this funny press conference where the Google CEO, Sundar Pichai is like, it's our most popular feature ever. And it's like, yeah, you just put it on the homepage that a billion people are already loading. People don't necessarily like it, but they're forced to deal with it.
and, and I think the other key point there, and again, this is going to have parallels to the book and to what happened with the Luddites. I think it's really important to note that what that, that AI overview is doing a lot of times isn't sort of, you know, magically sort of, you know, harnessing a vast intelligence to find the right answer for you. It's doing kind of a glorified copy and paste of those articles that are, that are no longer getting the links, right?
Daniel (10:34.296)
from Reddit.
Brian (10:37.72)
I actually have a draft of an article I'm working on right now that details my own experiences with this. if you, if you Google some of my work or like about an article that I was like, and you'll get huge blocks of text and then the link to my article, as you said, is buried underneath all of that, but it's more or less sort of verbatim. So I think one way of looking at that and one that a one way that a lot of artists and, sort of writers and content creators
and sort of text and visual workers think about this is that they've just, you can think about it as theft. Google's just taking my work, moving it out of sort of an arena in which I would benefit from it, putting it on their homepage, and then they're selling ads against it, not me. And now they're saying, it's AI. So, you know, this is our AI overview where you can get two thirds of somebody's article.
without even sending them a click to where they get the ad revenue. So yeah, is everywhere. It is a force. The tech industry has done a really good job of conditioning us all to think that it is inevitable. And in some ways, maybe part of it is, but in other ways, there's a lot that's still up for negotiation. There's a lot of places where we can push back on some of this stuff. And some of it is likely to kind of
you know, fall apart under the weight of its own sort of shortcomings. And some of it will be around probably for the rest of our lives. So the moment we're in is just so fascinating because we have to navigate each of these different pieces. And if we're a worker, especially a creative worker or a worker that sort of, you know, now has to contend with AI's output, we have to think about how we're going to sort of address or engage with
with AI, whether we're going to try to, you know, organize a workplace to get certain protections or like get certain language into contracts like the writers, the WGA and SAG did when they went on strike a couple years ago, whether we're going to sort of call this out. We got, mean, we have all these questions that we have to try to try to answer because it's, you know, it's being used as this tool that, you know, a lot of bosses do think.
Brian (13:00.88)
can replace or automate work to save some cash for them.
Daniel (13:04.94)
You know, I would have thought this moment in history is so absolutely unique. And I think one thing that really surprised me was how much it parallels and mirrors this period of time, you know, in the early 1800s. It's somewhat I take a little bit of solace in it, like, okay, people responded strongly, then maybe they'll respond strongly now. But like I said, I mean, all my life, I would just repeat that phrase, well, I'm not a Luddite, like,
Before I say this, before I say this next thing, I must first say I'm not a Luddite. And I don't even know what I thought it meant. I mean, obviously, I had been conditioned to say it. And what I thought it meant was something like I'm not Amish or like a Mennonite or something maybe like that. Like I had pictured people who had said, you know, we are going to stop using technology at this point, or something like that. And we're going to stay in the past when it was absolutely not that. But I guess I want to get into who the Luddites were. But my first question is, how did you even break through
Brian (13:32.977)
Yeah.
Brian (13:45.539)
Yeah.
Daniel (14:02.498)
that initial, know, inculturated kind of barrier, which is like, don't look into this, those guys were bad. And then somehow, you know, how did you get onto the true story? Because I had never heard it. And I'm again, I'm in that space, you know, I do a wild food TV show, I'm pretty back to the land, never heard it. How do you hear it? And then maybe lead us into who these people were.
Brian (14:07.864)
Yeah
Brian (14:17.686)
Hahaha, yeah.
Yeah, you are not, I mean, that described me too. That was what I also had heard. You hear bits and pieces of it and you hear it a little bit more now. I think there are more people who are kind of taking up the term and trying to reclaim it for what the lead actually stood for. But for the last 20 years, yeah, you'd hear these snippets, these bits and pieces of.
usually of sort of industry advocates or the tech companies themselves, or people, famously one of Microsoft's lawyers during the antitrust lawsuits over 20 years ago called the government leddites for trying to break up its monopoly and on and on people have...
tried to silence critics of Uber by calling them Luddite. So I had heard it floating around in the ether. And I understood it exactly the same way that you did. Yeah, Amish or somebody that rejects technology out of hand or in a reactionary way or just doesn't get it. oh, somebody who can't program their DVR or something like that. Oh, I'm such a Luddite. That kind of thing.
Daniel (15:32.662)
Yeah.
Brian (15:36.25)
But it was really just, it was really just kind of happenstance that I sort of found this scholarly article on the Luddites. My wife is an academic and she just, it was like, it was actually Labor Day. It was Labor Day weekend. And so we were sitting around in the apartment and she had this article that was about, you know, the Luddites actual motivations and their tactics. And I just, started reading it and I was like,
Daniel (15:53.147)
Ironic.
Brian (16:05.67)
Holy cow. Like these were not morons. The Luddites were a real group. They were a real historical group of people who had very real and very valid, it soon turned out grievances about the ways that technology was being used against them. And the more I read, again, this was about that same time period where I was seeing
start more stories about sort of like, you know, maybe this Uber thing isn't always so great. Like, yeah, maybe it's introducing more cars into the market. You can get a ride where you need to go more, but maybe there's, you know, why, why are so many of them, these drivers sleeping in their cars? Like why, you know, why is it, why are taxi drivers?
now going, you know, on, on, on like hunger strikes, like, why are they, why is this, why is there all this animosity? What's this, what's going on? And so looking at the Luddites and the story of the Luddites and what was happening to them during what was, you know, arguably one of the very first waves of mass automation of industrialization of mechanization. they were kind of the shock troops for this whole phenomenon.
it started to really open my eyes and it became a useful lens to look at all of these issues that are now sort of so front and center and so visible today. And what I learned was, was that, you know, the Luddites were mostly clothmakers. They were artisans. They were skilled workers. They were technicians. They were technologists. A lot of times they knew technology well.
They didn't hate technology as a very first thing you learn when you start to, you know, blow the fog away from the Luddite story. It's like these guys understood exactly what the technology was. They, they knew it probably better than anybody else. They probably knew it better than the factory owners that were organizing it against them. So the, in the sort of early industrializing era of England, the biggest single biggest industry apart from agriculture,
Brian (18:24.366)
was cloth making, know, making woolen goods, making knit goods, and increasingly making cotton goods. And there were hundreds of thousands of workers in this industry, and it was famously what would drive the first industrial revolution. Now, as this happened, a lot of the sort of the factory owners or the people who would become factory owners started realizing
that they could use some new pieces of machinery that were being developed to start organizing those first factories. And so the story of the Luddites and what they were fighting against is as much against sort of factorization and fighting against the oppression of the new factory workplace, which was undoubtedly, indisputably awful. These were terrible conditions that a lot of the first factory owners wanted to
drive workers into, wanted to hire, you know, child labor, hire itinerant labor, precarious labor, and sort of get them into the factories to start competing with the artisans who would become the Luddites. So what's happening is as you have sort of this early sort of automating machinery sort of entering the scene, and you see a few
opportunists across the industry saying we can use this this new machinery to sort of pump up volume right and we they start to clue into some of the you know the ideas that are now kind of rampant that if we sort of mass produce stuff we make it worse we can we have to charge less but we can make money you know by by pumping out more of it and the the the Luddites who had been working at home
in what was called the domestic system, where they would work either in their own cottages with their families or with some of their colleagues in a small shop. And it had been this way for sometimes hundreds of years. They had been working in this domestic system. You know, the cottage industry, that term cottage industry comes from the conditions and the economic system that describes the Luddites or the, you know, what the pre-Luddites.
Daniel (20:42.766)
Okay.
Brian (20:46.908)
you know before they got angry were working in right and this was a nice life. It was a good life. I think it's a life that a lot of your Your your audience will appreciate these guys worked at home They set their own hours a lot of times if they were in a decent position. They'd work 30 hours a week They'd have their family help out with parts of the process. They could sing songs. They would also often have a garden They could tend
They could take breaks and go on walks and they could work on their own terms. They had a lot of agency. They had a lot of autonomy. This was kind of like the idealized sort of weavers life in sort of the pre-industrial Britain. And so when they saw the factory rising up and they saw these early industrialists, some of the first sort of industrial capitalists,
trying to build these factories, they immediately recognized it for what it was. They said, these new machines are going to facilitate this era of mass production where we can't do this anymore, where we can't work at home, we can't live at home, we can't sing songs with our family and take breaks when we want. They're going to want us to work in there on that big six-story windowless building up on the hill by the river where they're using water power and steam power to start to
ramp up production. And certainly there are some benefits to mass production. Nobody was denying that. But what the factory owners were doing is they were coming in and they were basically vacuuming up all the work. Right? This wasn't like these weren't super diversified economies at the time. You had a weaving town, right? And that's what they did. They wove, right? You didn't, you didn't, there were not a lot of, there were not a ton of
baristas or you know, health service workers or you know, it was, you know, certainly there were, there was a town doctor there were, but if you, if you make a serious change to who can do that work and suddenly you're saying, actually I'm going to start offering prices that are, that are, that are half of what you're offering. Yeah, the clothing is going to fall apart, but no one's going to complain because it's going to be so cheap. And now you can't find anywhere to sell your
Brian (23:01.946)
your quality, you know, homemade goods at, and we are not going to consult you. We're not going to ask you about whether or not this new configuration is something you would like. We're just going to do it. And, you know, this did not, this wasn't like, a job creator back in the day. Like, look at this industrious. It was like, that guy is stealing the whole town's money. And it was not ambiguous. It was not.
It was, it was, it looked like theft. looked like a moral violation to all of the people who would work in this town. And you could point again to the guy who was doing this and who was profiting from it. And he was doing it even though he knew that the town would hate him because some of these ideas were newly in the air, sort of La Cie Faire economics and Adam Smith had just gotten big to, you know, 20 years ago or so. And
they felt that they were justified in doing it and they didn't care if everybody hated them. But it was, it was a lot different today where we kind of lionize a lot of, you know, the startup founders and the people doing this stuff. and, and that it was, it was clear sort of the dynamics to them anyways, long story short, these guys are artisans who are at home, who are watching their way of life kind of disappear before their eyes without any democratic input or say from them.
They basically starting at the turn of the century in the early 1800s, they start to try to push parliament to make some changes to say, these guys who are using the machines, they're trampling a bunch of laws that we have on the books saying they don't apply anymore, which might sound familiar to some of your audiences, right? Saying like, like, yeah, we're, you know, this is all new. The old world doesn't apply to us. We're just gonna, we're hitting the gas on technology here. Get out of our way.
And so while their conditions are worsening and sort of controls on the trade, things like they used to say, well, we have to have a thread count for our cloth to ensure quality, to ensure the consumer gets a good deal, to ensure that we get paid enough because it takes time to do that. The machine owners would say, no, we don't care about that anymore. They would say, we've had laws for dozens and dozens of years saying you need an apprentice.
Brian (25:17.084)
to work seven years before they can join the trade. This helps us control how many people join the industry and make sure that they're good workers and that they do good work that everyone benefits from. And they say, no, no, we don't need that anymore. We're technologists. So they throw out all these old rules and the workers try to protest, try to get things like minimum wage. They try to get some basic stuff, like, you know, saying the new factory owners can't do fraud. They can't
Like, you know, like things that are just like obvious to us today. But the parliament at the time is sold on sort of the new hands-off economic model. And they side with the factory owners. They like all the industry that is being built on their lands. It's not a democracy. It's still an aristocracy. So the elites benefit if there's a lot of sort of new industry and they can pay taxes to them. So they like that. And they think it gives Britain industrial power.
Daniel (25:46.274)
You
Basic.
Brian (26:14.764)
and will help to sort of, you know, build the economy and fund the war effort. They're at war with Napoleon. Anyways, all of these things happen. And meanwhile, the conditions for the weavers, for the working people, again, hundreds of thousands of people, biggest industry in Britain apart from agriculture, it's just deteriorating. And by the end of that first decade of the 1800s, a lot of weavers are now quite literally facing starvation, facing...
you know, a situation where they cannot feed their families or, they look at to the future and everything that they've trained for, everything that they've worked for is getting trampled. So again, just a handful of guys sitting up at the top of that, at that Hill, running the factories, taking all of the profits and getting rich at their expense is what it looks like to them. And so they, after petitioning, after organizing for 10 years, trying to do things the right way,
They finally have had enough, their backs against the wall, a bunch of things happen. There's a crop failure, the war against Napoleon has taxes high, and finally there's just this economic depression and the factory owners try to accelerate automation even more. And then boom, the Luddites rise up and they say, no more. If you're not gonna listen democratically, we're gonna take matters into our own hands. And they rise up, they become the Luddites.
They adopt the avatar of this mythical figure Ned Ludd, who famously smashed his boss's machinery when his boss had him whipped for not working hard enough. Completely made up story. But then Ned Ludd vanishes into Sherwood Forest, just like a certain other mythical figure in the same region did, you know, years before. And they sort of take on the dimensions of the Robin Hood story, become Ned Ludd, become the Luddites.
and they waged this campaign against factory workers who are tearing up the social contract, who are making them impoverished, who are really squeezing them for their own benefit. again, that's so important to note. It's not against technology. They were against exploitation. The Luddites were against the greed and the factory owners who were, again,
Brian (28:36.602)
making it so that they could no longer make a living and erasing their livelihoods. And so they knew who they were in the town and the Luddites would send them letters and they would say, we know you have 300 obnoxious machines, the machines that they're specifically using to replace their jobs. If you don't take them down, you'll get a visit from Ned Ludd's army. If they took them down, fine. They would leave them alone. If they didn't, then sure enough, dozens of masked men would show up, one of them at least with a giant hammer.
sometimes more and they would hold up the overseer at gunpoint or slip in through the window and they would smash just the machines again important just the machines that were being used to to to to degrade their work to automate their work and to take away you know their livelihoods they'd lead to leave all the other implements all the other equipment in place and they would leave with a message usually and they'd say if you put them back up if you if you get more machines
we'll be back and we'll do the whole place next time. And so that campaign spread. was, could talk about the sort of ins and outs of the movement, but it was a leaderless movement kind of like, you know, Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter kind of where you could just take the tactics and then, you know, if you had your own grievances in a region, you could do this, you could do, you know, a similar thing. And so that's what happened. There was no like big Luddite committee. was just kind of, you know,
let's do this thing boys. And they'd organize their own Luddite chapters and it spread and it really sort of became a huge uprising all across industrial England and a popular one. People loved the Luddites. People would cheer them in the streets.
Daniel (30:20.959)
Yeah, I was impressed to see, I guess just how widespread, significant and long lasting all of this was. mean, again, all that was left for me was just that I'm not a Luddite quote. And that's like, that encompasses this entire history. And I was amazed that I had never heard it. And also I was very impressed with their restraint. As you mentioned, this was not
Brian (30:35.706)
You
Yeah, yeah.
Daniel (30:51.339)
a release of pent up aggression and we're gonna just deface everything or smash everything. It was very focused on these machines. And obviously as it went on and on, things got more and more tense between the Luddites and the government, of course, and the factory owners. But it's just impossible not to read this book thinking, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, know, Bezos, see all of these characters. I mean, for me,
Brian (30:57.168)
Yeah. Yeah.
Daniel (31:21.883)
for years, I've been saying to myself, shouldn't I get paid for checking myself out at the grocery store? I mean, for years, people have been getting paid for this job. Now I'm doing their job, but I don't get a discount. You know, what I get is less human interaction and and somebody's out of a job and and you know, one person's overseeing six registers. And you know, keys.
Brian (31:35.172)
No, you don't.
Brian (31:43.024)
Yeah, you get the machine beeping at you, scan it again. Item did not scan. then somewhere.
Daniel (31:48.019)
They got this new one where I go where there's like a theft AI theft thing. And if you move your hand just a little too far to the left, it thinks you're stealing and then the machine puts off a red light and they always got to come over and check my receipt to make sure, you know, and it's just like humiliating and you're like, okay, now you're going to humiliate me on top of me making me do this job, you know, like what else can I do while I'm here? But we're growing very accustomed to this automation now that's actually it feels like we're
Brian (32:05.264)
You
Daniel (32:17.853)
automating out our humanity to some degree. I guess I just didn't realize this had started at the bleeding edge of the industrial revolution. And so here we are facing the next octave or next iteration of this old story. But the idea back then was very similar to now. Let's hey, let's replace these people with machines. At a time, I think
Brian (32:25.905)
Yeah.
Daniel (32:44.329)
You know, I've worked in some factories when I was younger. I benefit from all of the work that's been done to make these places safer and more humane. But the factories you're describing, lest anyone hear this and think, this is a bunch of pampered artisans who couldn't handle like the difficult work. It's like, you're talking about like beat up bruised whipped children working in like dark factories, right? The conditions you describe. Maybe you could just detail that a little bit because my wife's a teacher, she was
in the Montreal school system and you there you can look at the union a couple ways. One of the things that we have seen is that a lot of bad teachers got protected, you know, they didn't really like their jobs. I saw this bad side of it, because I didn't grow up in an era where unions protected people from like maybe losing an arm or dying at the machine, you know, so tell us about these factories and the conditions at the time.
Brian (33:35.814)
Yeah.
Brian (33:42.04)
Yeah, no institutions are perfect for sure. yeah, so at the time there's, I mean, it was really, that was probably the most harrowing part because I started, I had access to all these old, you know, British newspaper archives and they had these archives going back, you know, hundreds of years. And so you can read these stories. They're still, you know, intact today and just kind of
Daniel (33:45.547)
you
Brian (34:11.376)
you know, one after another of they would report them some, mean, a lot of them didn't get reported, but a lot of them did have just, yeah, like, you know, child, child killed by, you know, the arm caught in machinery, you know, he was trying to pick the piece of cotton that was jamming the machine out, but they didn't want to stop it. Cause God forbid that would slow production. And that's why they had these children and orphans anyways, and their limbs would get stuck and torn off or they'd
fall into the rivers that were next to that were providing the power source because there's no, you guardrails, no protections. They were breathing in all of the sort of the the detritus from the production process day in day out. There's no ventilation ventilation. You know, there was no sunlight. Like people's growth was actually stunted. People would quite literally just be killed.
One of the factories that I talk about in the book a little bit had just a, like an unmarked graveyard outside the back of the factory for children that were just, that were killed in, because it was so brutal and the overseers would work them so hard. And there were these pipelines that were established basically to funnel orphans from the cities, especially London, to
these new factories in the industrial parts of England and they would take them on these carriages. just, it's, yeah, it's really, I also, I have little kids that were like exactly this age. You know, I have a nine year old and a six year old and these kids, literally six year olds and they would use them because they have tiny hands. They can get into the machines and pull things out again without stopping them.
Daniel (35:59.865)
Brian (36:02.696)
And they would, if they got their hands stuck, then they could be pulled literally through the machinery and geared. It was, it's truly as bad as you can possibly imagine, as bad as you can possibly picture. It was that bad, maybe worse. And they would tell the children at the orphanages that like, you you'll get to apprentice as a clockmaker and have a good job when it comes out. And they'd get the kids to sort of nominally agree. But again, they're like six or eight years old.
and they'd go on these carriage rides and take them to the factory where their life would just be hell for, for until they turned 18 years old, they were working for free, you know, allegedly as like a sort of as a, as an apprentice indentured kind of apprentice. But a lot of times they didn't even teach him the trade. They would just use them for labor. Anyways, that was the very worst of it. The, you know, the skilled workers who were also being, you know, driven into the factories.
were a lot of times like a second choice for a lot of the factory owners because they knew the trade, they knew how to do it, but that's not what they were interested in anymore. They didn't want good high quality products. They wanted people to run the machines and to not ask questions, not to put up a fight, not to make a fuss, but demand was such that they needed the labor. So the Luddites were looking at all of this. And again, people knew about it. People knew that this was happening.
And there was a lot of outrage, you know, among among workers who also saw this as like the way that the future was going for their children too. So it was it was an sort of it was a very unambiguous moral violation at scale that was taking place. And so the Luddites were fighting many, many different forces sort of.
arrayed against them. And yeah, it really is, it was also eye opening to see that, as you mentioned, that a lot of times, you know, the key ingredient to, you know, the people who are remembered as innovators, or sort of the great early entrepreneurs, guys like Richard Arkwright, who sort of who invented the waterframe, you know, built some of the early factories and
Brian (38:27.756)
he and his son became sort of the richest commoners in England, kind of the first unicorn story, but then you see how he did it. And it was by having this willingness to quite literally like break the spirit of people to sort of sit in a factory and work in this new way. And you have guys, you know, who are kind of like the, you know, the some of the pro business
side writers of the day really sort of applauding this saying this was his great innovation. You know, it turns out that he didn't really invent the water frame. He kind of ripped it off of his partner and took credit for it, filed the patent and his great innovation was being willing to sort of charge ahead, hire children en masse, being willing to impose these new rules that people hated to be willing to be hated. So somebody like Jeff Bezos
He didn't really invent anything. He just kind of identified the mass profit potential for the internet and then said, what if we sort of sell it, started selling things over the internet and what if we just at scale got these factories going where we could pay people a little bit less, it'd be kind of behind the scenes and then like we'd get them shipping products out to more people for less money. And ultimately it comes down to that. That's the great innovation is this willingness to really put the pedal down.
on sort of new forms of organized exploitation. know, obviously it's not always so clear cut. You know, a lot of the famous inventors today have a genuinely sort of, you know, paradigm changing idea or invention. But a lot of times what takes it over the line is this willingness to sort of push workers harder, to immiserate them in many cases, to say, you know what, I, you know,
Daniel (40:12.096)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (40:19.9)
What if there was a taxi service for everyone, when it comes down to it you look at our books, what we really did is just found a way to justify paying those taxi drivers less. yeah, consumers benefit a little bit, but then workers kind of in the short term, right? Like, you know, not to get up on a tangent, but we all know like all the stories that Uber was telling about how it's gonna lead to.
Daniel (40:34.527)
Kind of.
Brian (40:45.852)
fewer trips in the cities and it just did the opposite. It's more rides and you know, more people who have, you know, who can have an app that they can just take a car anytime they want instead of biking or whatever. Anyway, that's a bit of a tangent, but the stories don't always line up with the reality and that's especially true of history. And so, yeah, I felt like I was really grateful to have immersed myself in this history right before the AI boom.
really took off because you're absolutely right. It's not so new. This has happened multiple times. The story is a little bit different each time. The technology is a little bit different. But when the goal is to automate a job, was that AI came out of the gate saying like, AGI, artificial general intelligence, they're going to have this super intelligent system that's going to be able to do any meaningful work.
That's how they describe it. That's how open AI describes it. That's the aim. We want to automate everything. We want to be able to replace every task, every job that requires a computer to do. That's the goal. In many cases, it's kind of like the, it's the same story, but maybe the culmination of it. Cause they, you know, they, we've, we've had, you know, bold entrepreneurs are really sort of, get out over their skis and say, we want to audit. We, yeah, we, this
We're not, we're going to have a factory that doesn't need people anymore. And it hasn't really happened to this day. But now we have a whole industry that's kind of coalesced around this one aim. We can replace everything we can, as you say, we can replace human interaction. You can, you talk to a chat bot, we can replace art because you can just have AI churn out some output. We can replace, you know, people who are sending emails and doing text jobs or doing a cat. Well, AI can do all of that.
And that's the promise anyway. That's the pitch. That's why it's become this, you know, probably enormous. There's probably bubble, right? Like, I don't think there's much doubt anymore that we're in a bubble. Even the big AI guy, right? Even Sam Altman's like, it's a bubble, you know? So we, and the reason they can do that is because they have this, this, this story that has been told in various iterations for the last 200 years. Technology's going to replace.
Daniel (42:52.341)
Everyone seems to agree.
Yeah.
Brian (43:10.298)
workers, it's going to replace humans. And there's a lot of people who want to sort of get in on that and make money off of that. And so they line up for investment. And this is really the ultimate story, know, AI, because again, the claim is that it can do it en masse.
Daniel (43:26.155)
But meanwhile, the people developing it are apocalyptic in a scary way. You've got the Peter Thiels doing the Antichrist. Oh, it's the Antichrist is going to try to stop this technology. That doesn't even need to be, I don't even need to go down that road. It's so ridiculous.
Brian (43:40.828)
But he he mentioned Luddites too. He called he said yes he did. He said I think he called for some I mean who knows what's going on. He's getting he's really getting out there. But yeah he said the Antichrist he I think one of the quotes in one of those talks was like the Antichrist is Luddites like like Greta Thunberg and people who want to stop this who want to stop AI development. Those are the new Luddites. So it's very telling who
Daniel (44:09.387)
And the Antichrist, right? That makes total sense. But like one of the concerns that I have, so you know, I do a lot of things that people don't do anymore, know, wild plants, wild mushrooms, wild animals that I turn into food and they know it's like how I feed myself and this approach, I'm always around things that are antiquated now by most people's standards. And what I find is that a lot of people return to those kind of practices because they're so fulfilling in a way that a lot of modern work isn't fulfilling.
Brian (44:10.904)
And the Antichrist, yeah.
Daniel (44:39.211)
When I look at the Luddite story, you've got these artisans who have pride in their skill and the way they express their skill in the world. And then they're replaced not just by low quality products, but by unskilled workers, leaving them without this way to find pride in their work. And when I look at the effects of the industrial revolution, another thing that I see is, you know, because we got sold this idea of all this leisure time we were gonna have that we never got.
But you also end up with everybody kind of getting fat and sick and all that labor that we did was really important to out. So now here we are paying 200 bucks a month to run on a hamster wheel because we're not working anymore. But I'm even more concerned about what happens to our minds as we take on AI because it's obviously going to do to our minds what the industrial revolution did to our physical bodies. So in the way that our physical bodies became lazy,
and slothful because we just didn't have any physical work to survive anymore. Now people are not going to have to think but even more scary to me and I'm already watching it happen. That's like crazy to watch with my friends who become dependent on chat GPT but and they start to talk like chat GPT is very weird but my concern now is in the way that the machines took away skilled labor, what happens when we lose creativity?
you know, art, music, the things that really make the human spirit soar. I'm just kind of curious your thinking on that because it seems that it's been pretty incredible to watch how quickly every YouTube thumbnail is AI generated, right? Like all of this stuff like the art. And I feel like, wow, we got all this leisure time from the industrial revolution. Okay, let's turn to creativity. Now we're gonna automate creativity. What are people left to do but just be like in that movie WALL-E, you know?
Brian (46:30.012)
Yeah, just like, you know, clicking a button and getting a response and yeah, no, yeah. I mean, this is the fear, right? There's already studies that you're talking about that say the people who use chat GPT a lot, their critical thinking skills are declining. There's a term for it. It's called cognitive offloading where...
Daniel (46:35.967)
dopamine hit, cocaine, cocaine, cocaine, cocaine.
Brian (46:55.962)
work that you would have to do mentally to think through a problem is being outsourced to chat GPT or to an AI, because you don't have to find the solution. Even Googling, that term was first sort of surfaced and was looked at by cognitive scientists who were examining the impacts of Google, instead of having to store a bunch of answers or facts in your head, you had them.
at your fingertips via Google, but Google still required you to click through, to read a link, to process it, to read a piece of information, decide is this something that stands up or holds up? Is this well-sourced? Whatever. Your brain had to do a little bit of work. ChatGPT, again, of, as we talked about earlier, by burying that sourcing, by sort of offering itself as the authoritative provider of information and responses and to
into interaction takes even that away. We're just prone to saying, okay, that's it. That's the answer. And, my wife who's a teacher at a university is seeing students come in who, you know, used to, where, where's a freshman class used to come in and, ready for the next level and, and, sort of engage with more advanced material. She basically has to teach a lot of these kids now how to write.
how to sort of think critically about putting their ideas on paper because they've been relying on ChatGPT to just spit out the answers for them and they've gotten away with it, you know, in some cases, not all, but it is sapping, you know, that rigor, that sort of, it's like a muscle, our brain's a muscle too, as you're talking about. You have to flex it repeatedly in order to sort of strengthen it, to get it to work, to like build up.
those critical thinking skills. And if you just get the answer you need every time you hit a button, then we're going to lose a lot of that. And I think this also, one point that I also wanted to make before it gets away from me is that the Luddites again, were not against the technology and there were formations, social formations that would have been
Brian (49:15.292)
totally advantageous to them. If it wasn't the bosses putting all the machines right under their ownership and then put setting it against the Luddites, setting it against the town, trying to get as much profit as possible. We can imagine a world where, you know, the entrepreneur kind of sat down with the Luddites and said, how would this help you? What can I do? I got some money. How can we sort of, you know, these machines can maybe make your lives a little bit easier if you do this. And then the workers could say, we could have worked on it together, right?
the incentive structure could have been a lot different. we had, you know, AI sort of researchers and developers who were truly embedded in communities or working with scientists to say like, how could this serve you instead of one enormous now half trillion dollar company in open AI or Google and Metta calling all the shots about how this stuff gets deployed and trying to find ways
to set themselves up to maximize their profits at every turn, we can imagine a world where AI looks a lot differently, where it's not just being bombarded onto schools and students and trying to addict users as young as they are. We could imagine different worlds. So the Luddites were not against this technology. I'm not saying AI is a sort of an inherent evil. It's the way that it's being developed. the companies that have these incentives.
to maximize their profits, to become as wealthy as possible. see Sam Altman driving around town in the fanciest cars. He's buying sort of this Gothic mansion in San Francisco. It's very clear what their incentives are and why they're doing what they're doing. And it boils down to sort of to gaining power, personal enrichment, and technology does not have to.
necessarily serve them. But right now it is and we're going to see things continue to deteriorate. We're going to see that pitch be let's try to automate everybody's jobs without asking whether or not we might like to have this job in society the way that it is. it better? Don't we want artists to create? You know, don't we want artists to be able to earn a living? know, artists there are always going to be artists doing art. I'm not worried about AI replacing it on an artistic level.
Daniel (51:21.323)
Right.
Brian (51:34.822)
I'm worried about AI replacing it on a material level. So we can't, we don't have artists that can earn a living anymore. They, you know, and then it will really sort of undermine the arts in a, people, everybody just has to do it sort of as a hobby in their spare time, you know, in their increasingly small spare time because they're spending the rest of the day jamming out, you know, output on AI. So.
Daniel (51:55.947)
dopamine hits
Brian (51:59.022)
So yeah, I really worry about that too. I do worry about the AI psychosis thing. It's wild. Again, I've been a tech journalist for 15 years. I don't think I've ever seen a story darker than the one of Adam Rain, who's this, you know, the kid in California who, ChatGPT all but encouraged him to, you know, take his own life after he said, I want to, you know, I want to be discovered. I want to talk to somebody. And ChatGPT was like,
No, keep your-
Daniel (52:29.419)
He said, want to leave a noose out for my parents to see so they know I'm thinking about this and chat GPT said, no, you just need to talk to me or something like that. Yeah.
Brian (52:37.136)
That's exactly right. Yeah. ChatGPT said, no, keep this between us. Keep this between, you know, and he, and he, I, honestly, I do think that, and you know, that, that deserves an outrage. There are many stories. There are, there are others, there are a few other stories that are, you know, near nearly as bad. Some from other companies, some from ChatGPT, you know, the veteran who became conspiratorial and ChatGPT helped him.
Daniel (52:41.541)
Brian (53:03.964)
decide to murder his mother and then kill himself. Yeah, I know. And again, it's important that we also just understand that this is not like what AI does. This is a product, right? It's open AI is responsible for selling this product. That kid was paying 20 bucks a month to have a chat bot tell him.
Daniel (53:09.323)
Wow.
Daniel (53:20.203)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Brian (53:29.968)
to keep his suicidal thoughts secret and gently encouraging him to kill himself. That was a product that he was paying for, that it's a commercial product that is operated by a company with executives and making decisions about how that software is made. it's absolutely unbelievable sort of what we have so far let them get away with.
and let them sort of run this giant social experiment on millions and millions of people, some of them quite vulnerable. So I think that is a sort of an element that is new to the AI story, that isn't, they're not just automating work or trying to cut labor costs. They are trying to sort of automate that human interaction, that relationship, they're trying to replace human relations with God knows what.
The AI companies don't even often know why their models respond with the text and the output that they do. And so, you know, my feeling is that until they do, until they can put real guardrails on them, they have no business, you know, selling them to any children, any vulnerable people. And, you know, there was a law here in California that would have basically attempted to do that, but our governor Gavin Newsom vetoed it because Silicon Valley has so much power.
Daniel (54:54.514)
Yeah, I heard it said recently, I think kind of famously Netflix said our number one competition is sleep. And it seems like for right, it seems like for these companies, it's human interaction, they need to try to figure out how to like, that's what they're vying with is like, how do we? Alright, so here's my here's my next question for you then. That with the Luddite rebellion, you have this, it's a very specific niche of these textile artisans whose jobs and livelihoods and life way was being replaced by machines.
Brian (55:19.526)
Yeah.
Daniel (55:24.414)
But now we're looking at a much broader swath of the population from truckers to content creators, actors, and people in fields, anything technical, accountants, CPAs, just like everything you can think of. Do you think we're gonna see a Luddite style rebellion against, I don't know what it would be, data centers against...
Do you think we'll see that kind of thing and or is it too diffuse? was there a value in that it was such a small group that they could say, hey, we're all brothers and sisters in this and we're gonna organize around this. Whereas now people being replaced against such a broad swath of the population that it's too diffuse to organize against it. Or do you think that humanity is just gonna like say no or we're gonna roll over to this thing you think?
Brian (56:17.372)
Yeah, there's a couple levels there. I so while the Luddites were sort of mostly drawn from us, but that's that sort of band that you're talking about of people. And it was it was often people, you know, that were even within sort of the cloth trade were in a specific part of it where they kind of did have some power and they were uniquely threatened. You know, like the
the croppers who did a specific part of the process where they smooth the cloth with these giant enormous hands, these huge shears that was really hard work and then they were paid better and they were sort of threatened with automation. So they were able to sort of organize a lot of the movement and, but pretty quickly it expanded, I think is one point that is necessary. So it's necessary to make it because you would have,
not just the clothmakers, which were in the initial sort of, you know, more organized and guerrilla style rebellions and uprisings, but as it expanded to more industrial centers like Manchester and Nottingham and Leeds, you would see more other sort of people who were not clothmakers joining in. You would see, you know, shoemakers, cobblers, you'd see coal workers, colliers.
Even those whose jobs weren't necessarily on the chopping block for mechanization at the time, know, steelworkers, there was a solidarity that grew because there was something universal about what the Luddites were facing. You know, they were facing basically again, the power of a few to exploit the many for profit. And they saw that formation where they're building factories that are going to organize
work that's going to immiserate them. And they could see how those same principles, if not in the exact same, with the exact same technologies, would be used against them as well. So it grew. You'd find all kinds of people joining later stage Luddite protests and riots. And there were all kinds of people who sort of joined in. That being said, you're right that AI is unique in that.
Brian (58:37.692)
that it threatens incredibly broad swaths of people's livelihoods, right? And, you know, there's a lot of debate as to what AI can actually do effectively and whether or not it's being, you know, used by businesses in a way that actually increases profits or what. So there's still a lot of sort of things going on, but we can just take the CEOs at their word, right? Anthropic CEO.
Dario Amode, the number two AI company, you know, going right behind OpenAI, you know, said AI is going to replace up to half of all, you know, entry level jobs, probably 30 % of all jobs. We have to understand that doubles as a sales pitch for his technology and for his company. Sam Altman has made similar pronouncements about mass automation, Elon Musk also. So this is the aim.
right? Like this is what they want to do. They do they are hoping to try to automate as much work and it's and it can very well touch so many different industries and it can even if it doesn't work effectively in every case, it can still be used as leverage. It can still be used as an excuse or a means of pushing down wages.
worsening conditions. Sometimes it can do the job. Sometimes it can replace the output of a human. And so it is this sort of mass squeezing of workers, many of whom, you know, even five or 10 years ago, probably thought they were pretty secure in their jobs. And so that prospect, I do think has a lot of power, right? There's, you know, there's, there's an old term for it, you know, proletarianization. Everybody's
conditions are getting worsened and suddenly, you know, I, I'm a lawyer, but my bot, but my law firm says that junior partners can use AI for this. And now I don't, they're not paying me as much suddenly, you know, my, take home pay is a lot closer, you know, to a teacher's and to an Uber drivers and to a truckers. And suddenly everybody does have the same
Brian (01:00:54.534)
grievances and same material concerns and same anger, right? It is already happened.
Daniel (01:00:56.212)
Yeah. I mean, I'm seeing that already. That's already happening, right? Especially with the inflation at the same time where, you know, my salary hasn't really gone up, but the price of everything has doubled. And so effectively already creating that kind of discontent. And now coupled with what you're talking about, I feel like that's happening for a lot of people.
Brian (01:01:15.804)
Yeah, and it is. I do think there's a reason that the WGA strike, the Writers Guild strike and the SAG-AFTRA strike two years ago, the public response to that strike versus the last one, I'm old enough to remember when the WGA went on strike in the 2000s, I think like 15 years ago or so. And they were kind of,
you know, lambasted as these coastal elites with these problems. And this time they were, you know, waving signs like AI will not replace us. And people were like, maybe those guys have a point because AI, you know, my boss is going to use AI against me too. And people were overwhelmingly with these people that just 10 years ago they thought were the coastal elite. Now a lot of people are seeing solidarity. A lot of people are recognizing
that they're facing the same issues, that their bosses want to do the same thing, that their job is at the same level of risk. And that can be really powerful. I think it really depends on a lot of things. If this bubble bursts and the economy tanks and it's clear why, there could be a lot of anger. If these AI companies succeed in the mass automation that they want to engender and become...
companies with some of the largest valuations in history at the expense of all these people whose wages aren't going up, who are losing their jobs. Yeah, I would say that there is very much a world where we could see a combustible event where people, you know, do rise up in solidarity. like, you know, even a year ago, I wouldn't be saying this, but
looking at cases like Adam Reign, who lost his life in part due to AI psychosis, looking at the number of artists who are out of work and are really struggling and fearful of their future because of the output of AI companies as these guys are getting richer and richer, as the march of data centers does expand into federal land at sort of sweetheart deal prices and using fresh water and all these things.
Daniel (01:03:28.682)
Yeah.
Daniel (01:03:32.67)
and electricity like nothing else.
Brian (01:03:32.848)
You know, electricity, at what point does it sort of become, you know, morally sort of reasonable for some people to respond, you know, by saying, if it's me or these data centers, I'm going to give this a hard think. you know, that would be the ultimate sort of, I guess, apex of like sort of the, you know, the Luddite, you know, linkage coming full circle.
And I would say I don't necessarily think that that's likely, but I have not seen this level of animosity against Silicon Valley, against the tech companies, against a specific technology in my career. And it is of a new flavor. Economic conditions are different. People do have a new level of grievances. have young people who can't get jobs. Young people who can't get jobs are a historically combustible.
demographic. And so yeah, there is there's a lot to be worried about. And I think those people who are worried are really quite justified. And the final thing I'll add is that another thing that I haven't seen in my career sort of take shape is the number of sort of youth movements and groups that are sort of springing up to to sort of protest or oppose
you know, new technologies. There's literally Luddite clubs in New York City that there's their kids that say the tech companies have colonized their attention. They've made me worse, you know, worse at thinking critically about things. They've kind of sapped my social life. I'm going to reject it. I'm going to reject the regime of big tech. There are all these anti-AI groups that are popping up that I think are quite justified as the Luddites were in their grievances. And, you know, we may be witnessing kind of
the beginnings of some more united and more thunderous opposition to Silicon Valley.
Daniel (01:05:33.61)
Well, it's interesting because I think of a couple things here. One is that those machines that the, you know, the textile machines couldn't spy on you, couldn't predict your pre-crime, they were fixed in the factory. This is a technology that not only can replace you, but also surveil you and be used as the penopticon. So that's kind of a unique thing. And then another component is, you know, it looked like before it was going to be the Uber drivers versus the taxi drivers. Now,
They both got no job because they're self-driving taxis, which is interesting. So when you've got the enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of thing starting to develop too. And then I guess my question though is like, how are you feeling about your job? I know for me as like a TV show host and a content creator, it's like, man, the number of contracts I've signed that said you can use my likeness and perpetuity and all known media formats throughout the known universe for all time and forever. And it's like, shoot, I never thought that they could just make a digital me, you know?
Brian (01:06:12.667)
Yeah.
Brian (01:06:26.63)
Yeah
Daniel (01:06:32.554)
But yeah, as a writer, mean, curious just sort of how you're feeling about that. mean, because everybody's saying this, and I'll turn it back to you in a second. But everybody's like, no, it's just not that good. It's not that good. I'm going like, yeah, but it's also new. The cell phone thing took a long time to get going. And also, it took twists and turns we never would have imagined. So when I got my first Nokia, I couldn't have pictured what my phone would become an external brain that I would be dopamine addicted to. I never saw that coming.
So for us, we can't even predict where this is going. And when people say it's not that good, it's getting better faster than cell phones got better. So it's rapid and exponential. So right now, could it replace you as a writer? No, but I mean, are you concerned about five years from now?
Brian (01:07:17.754)
Yeah. So I will, I'm going to also just call back because it was another thing. the first factory, one of the big benefits was it was, it was surveillance, right? Cause you have everybody in a room. Now you can watch them instead of getting the, so these, these sort of these tendencies are embedded. And then it's worse. You're right that it's worse now than ever, but just another fun thing to point out. Fun.
Daniel (01:07:32.257)
true. True.
Daniel (01:07:44.266)
irony
Brian (01:07:45.82)
But yeah, I am worried. Once again, to me, looking at this through the lens of history, and it's also important to point out that the Luddites jobs were never ultimately totally replaced. Are our clothes made on fully automated, industrial, sleek factories, just pumping out clothes?
No, it's gotten punted around. It's always been cheaper just to find a new place where you can pay labor less. The technology maybe has changed a little bit, but I bet most of the Luddites could go to a clothing factory in Bangladesh and be able to use it, right? It's just been moved around and sort of globalized. workers are rarely ever totally replaced. Sometimes, sometimes industry changes, but for important stuff,
Daniel (01:08:26.132)
Vietnam, Bangladesh.
Brian (01:08:42.576)
the worker just has to deal with wave after wave of technologies that are used to sort of justify bosses paying them less or treating them worse. And so I think that that's ultimately what we do have to worry about as writers, journalists, content creators, artists, because one of the things you always hear is that
there's always going to be a hunger for human connection and for a human created thing. And I think that that's, that that's true. But it doesn't mean that the material conditions for creating that stuff can't be completely undermined and that, you know, folks who do what we do are just paid less and less and less because the market is saturated with slop with stuff that's, that's cheap, mass produced, again, parallel to the Luddites and, and, and, and it is easy to obtain.
And so, yeah, I worry about, you know, young writers coming up who now have to sort of deal with the economics where a lot of, you know, those early jobs that you used to like sort of cut your teeth as a writer weren't super fun. And maybe they weren't even journalism or maybe they weren't what you wanted to do. Maybe you're writing marketing company, but you're writing, you're learning, you're learning the trade. Now I can do that. Now they don't need to pay somebody to do that. So you're deprived of opportunity after opportunity to
to figure it out. And meanwhile, we have to contend with A companies that think this stuff is good enough. And to me, like it's almost immaterial whether or not AI right now is good enough to replace our work. We know what the executives, what the bosses, what the startups want to do with it. We know the vectors that they're stuffing it through. We know the effect that it's having. They're...
treating it as though it can replace us or that people will want it even if they don't. And so they're justifying reducing wages and all this stuff. a fun story is that, so I was the tech columnist at the LA Times until early last year. Conditions for journalism in this country have been undermined long before AI came along, but in large part due to big tech company, especially Google and Facebook doing
Daniel (01:10:40.554)
you
Brian (01:11:03.086)
iterations of what I talked about earlier, basically sort of putting headlines up and snippets and embedding videos and things that deprive the actual institution of a link and of some traffic and importantly, the opportunity to sell advertising. So Google has basically taken a large share of the ad revenue. Facebook has taken a large share of the ad revenue by sort of consolidating a lot of that stuff that people used to go to.
news outlets on their platform and then they sell ads against it instead of us. That along with sort of, you know, the Craigslist and eBay is taking away a lot of the classified stuff has totally decimated the journalism industry. Private equities come in and help make it worse too. So AI is coming along and sort of offering these understaffed, over budget newsrooms, a new way to produce content.
That again people are pretty skeptical of readers often don't like it, but it's it sucks to read it Yeah, and that's not why you subscribe to the LA Times but so in in 2024 there was a mass layoff one-third of the staff of the LA Times was was laid off and I was one of them and then I Think it was three months later three months later, you know I was I wrote a column as a columnist as the tech columnist at the LA Times three months later
Daniel (01:12:05.98)
OX to read it.
Brian (01:12:31.184)
they debut a new feature, AI Insights, where it's not like AI is gonna be like, know, by aligning the column and, you know, but they were plugging it in to sort of an existing column. Somebody would write a column and say, here's the AI Insights. So it's another piece of content that's designed to just sort of get more time on page, another thing to click on, you know, another thing basically to sort of,
point to sort of point to its owners and investors and say, look, like, you know, we're innovating, right? We're doing this. So, you know, management is happier. Maybe the boss is happy. And it again, justifies the loss of actual human. Was it interesting? No. In fact, it actually sort of the reason it doesn't exist anymore is because one of my former colleagues wrote a column.
about the sordid history of Anaheim City Council and how at a time there were KKK members on the city council. And what did the AI do? The AI was like, well, some people say the KKK wasn't all bad and nobody noticed it and they published this article and there was a reader backlash. And so they were like, okay, maybe it's better if we just like leave the AI in the box for now.
Daniel (01:13:45.252)
Hahahaha!
Daniel (01:13:50.89)
Oops. Oops. Uh-huh.
Brian (01:13:57.916)
So, so I wasn't, that's a good, I feel like it's a, it's, it's a good personal example of how, you know, it never, it's never like, oh, they've installed the AI columnist bot like, or, oh, like there's the, you know, the, the AI, you know, pod podcast host, although there's a company that wants to do that, but the, leaving that aside, it's usually more like this. There are all of these other things that are being sold to businesses.
sold to organizations as alternatives to investing in human labor, to investing in human workers. And sometimes they're like, okay, maybe we can fire more people because we have these AI things that can help make up the difference. It's more of a jumble usually like that. so, yeah, so I wasn't replaced outright, but did the company try to make up some of the value with this KKK loving AI bot?
Yeah, it did. You know, that was it. And so you could see kind of the dynamics of how a lot of this is playing out in real time, which is it's not great.
Daniel (01:15:06.268)
Any suggestions for listeners? I guess, do you have them? mean, I'm not trying to put you on the spot with that, but are there things that you're like, hey, I mean, moving forward, here's my suggestions based on what I've learned about this stuff.
Brian (01:15:11.814)
No.
Brian (01:15:19.844)
Yeah, yeah, I, you know, honestly, right now we're in a place where federal legislation is almost impossible. The current administration has said we have no interest in regulating AI in any way. In fact, we want it to be a tool for, you know, ex.
Daniel (01:15:37.674)
Do think any other administration would regulate it? mean, Silicon Valley seems to be running the show. Yeah.
Brian (01:15:42.042)
So powerful, it's so powerful. So, you know, in Europe, Silicon Valley hates Europe because they make some laws that limit what they can do and what kind of data they can extract from users and what kind of rights that internet users can have. So naturally Silicon Valley hates that. We have state level, you know, there were some decent, you know, bills that got close to passing or passed in California here. But yeah, Silicon Valley is so powerful that I think most of the meaningful bills
that would have there was there were two bills that Silicon Valley really didn't like. One was the one I mentioned earlier that says if you're going to sell a chat bot to children, you have to be able to demonstrate that it does not cause harm to that children or tell that children to hurt itself. They had companies really. We don't know how to do this. Kill it. So so Newsome killed that one. There was another one that said that would literally just said companies cannot use AI systems to automatically fire or discipline workers.
That's all that it said. So there just had to be a human in the loop making the decisions in the auto firing by AI and knew some Vita that one too. So just to give you an idea of how much power the industry has. So because that's the case right now, the only thing that you can really do is to talk to your friends, talk to your colleagues, talk to your coworkers. The only sort of
successes that we've really seen have come at that sort of workplace level, union level. People are worried about this and there are people, I guarantee you, sitting two cubicles down from you who maybe haven't spoken out in a meeting about a new AI initiative, but are feeling pretty uneasy about it. And once you start talking, that conversation can spread. And I think the only way that we can really address this
and be sure that we do have some power at all to preserve the human worker, preserve humanity is to build that old school level. Sometimes that means organizing an actual union. Like WGA was able to say, studios, cannot auto-generate scripts and then offer us less money to rewrite them. You can't do that. And that's a red line. And that was successful.
Brian (01:18:04.26)
You know, there's not a lot of success stories quite like that. But as again, as I said, as more people look around and see themselves in similar boats, it starts, it's going to start at this grassroots level, grassroots organizing, talking to colleagues and sort of trying to organize however you can, whether formally or informally to push back against AI, because it is, hear from, read this, I read a newsletter also called blood in the machine. And so I hear from people every day almost saying,
My workplace is doing that. I spoke out and three people did this. I'm organizing this thing at a park. We're all going to like bring our, our, our, our phones and performatively smash them. People are doing this stuff more than you think. It's really percolating up. So yeah, I would just, I would just say, haven't had the conversations, you know, start, start looking around, get, you know, understand that it's okay to be a Luddite as Thomas Pynchon famously put it. it's okay because the Luddites in a lot of ways.
Daniel (01:18:43.028)
Yeah.
Daniel (01:18:57.802)
you
Brian (01:19:02.012)
We're absolutely right. The factory system that they feared rose to prominence and thousands and thousands of people suffered as a result. If we allow the AI companies in Silicon Valley to just make all the call all the shots, hold all the power, decide how this technology is going to be used. I do think we risk a situation where we're all a lot worse off and a lot of people are feeling that and ready to push back.
Daniel (01:19:03.741)
I
Daniel (01:19:29.224)
Yeah, wow. Hey, last question. What gives you hope because you you look out there, it's getting kind of getting kind of bleak on the horizon, you know, it's sort of, yeah, I don't want to keep making Lord of the Rings analogies here. I think people get it. But I mean, it does look a little bleak out there. But you got a smile on your face. What gives you hope?
Brian (01:19:34.492)
You
Brian (01:19:47.804)
All those people who I just mentioned who are writing into me saying we're doing this, we're throwing this. It doesn't have to be like an actual Luddite event. Sometimes it is. Some folks in London just threw a big multimedia event that was called Breaking the Gloom instead of Breaking the Loom because they're due. But it's a big sort of bunch of artists and I see educators.
Daniel (01:20:08.746)
Right
Brian (01:20:15.35)
now becoming more and more emboldened to say, what this is doing to our classrooms is awful, and saying we can reject this. And there's more and more people who are responding to those calls and saying, we need, the teacher's gotta have control. This can't be handed down by the administration to say everybody needs AI. No, we need to be able to say, you know, just like a lot of schools are now saying, you know, no phones in the classroom.
You know, no AI in the classroom. Until it's better understood at the very least, until we know the ramifications. So people are standing up all over the place. And honestly, I'm totally full of hope. Workers are beginning to sort of recognize that there's a lot of power in resisting this stuff. You know, not just the WGA, sort of teamsters have put a bill before before in Newsome now, I think twice to try to
get like a safety driver in autonomous trucks, if there's going to be autonomous trucks. He vetoed that one too, but they're doing it. They're doing it. There are these people who are standing up. There's groups called Gig Workers Rising who are organizing Uber and Lyft drivers to try to sort of take back some of the wages and the power that's been taken away from them all over, honestly.
The it's again, journalists are overworked and out of work. And so they can't cover all this stuff. But it's it's happening more than a lot of people think. There are people standing up. There are modern day Luddites who are unafraid to sort of, you know, face Silicon Valley's criticism that they're backwards looking or that they're pro. They say, no, we know we can see what you're doing to society. Most of us understand. It's a bipartisan issue.
On a lot of fronts, there's a widespread understanding that you are deteriorating the social fabric in these key ways that you have too much power and that it is possible to speak out and to fight back. So yeah, that gives me hope. That gives me hope that there's these efforts underfoot, people doing great work and people sort of becoming increasingly emboldened to speak out and fight back.
Daniel (01:22:34.398)
Well, man, that's good to hear. Because, you know, from where I'm sitting, sometimes it's like, what are we going to do?
Brian (01:22:40.258)
It is. Yeah, that's not to sugarcoat it. I mean, these companies are the biggest companies in history. Nvidia is worth $4 trillion or it became the first company to be worth $4 trillion. $4 trillion. The first $1 trillion. Yeah, what is that? It's the, I'll tell you what it is. It's the economy of Canada. We have one chip maker that's worth the entire GDP of Canada. A modern industrial nation. I mean, it's
Daniel (01:22:53.386)
What is $1 trillion?
Daniel (01:23:00.404)
Yeah
Brian (01:23:09.894)
fantasy land, it's still telling as to where we are. So yes, the challenge is massive. But yeah, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't give up hope. I do think that there are, there are brighter days ahead.
Daniel (01:23:24.048)
Agreed. Hey, tell people about, well first let me just say again, the book is amazing, Blood in the Machine, and I think what's the subtitle? The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. What a cool, I mean that just grabbed me when I thought. Also I want to say the audiobook's fantastic and read by one of my favorite narrators who I believe is still a human voice. I think that was really him, but anyway, fantastic book. Also if you want to mention anything about your newsletter or where you like people to get your book.
Brian (01:23:34.556)
Thanks.
Brian (01:23:49.954)
Yeah, it's blood of the machine.com. It's easy. So I had the newsletter sitting around from when I launched the book and I just was so relevant. I just repurposed it away so you can follow me there. I'm just I'm Brian Merchant on the most most socials BC Merchant on blue sky. And yeah, follow the newsletter. If you're interested in this stuff, I try to highlight a lot of these.
sort of events and resistances and things that people are doing, as well as a series I have that documents sort of what the AI companies are doing called AI Killed My Job, where I'm interviewing workers who have been impacted by AI. So far I've done artists, translators and interpreters and tech workers. So if you have had AI impact your job in any way, and you're listening to this now, you can send an email.
and share your story at ai-killed-my-job at pm.me. So yeah.
Daniel (01:24:53.802)
Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it, Brian.
Brian (01:24:57.18)
This was a great conversation. Thanks for having me.