Automata Peon
*cover image screenshot off YouTube ad for AI assistant app
Whenever a new technology emerges that strikes fear in the hearts of mortals, someone in the conversation will point to the fact that mankind always resists innovation. "People thought the printing press was evil" they'll remind everyone without being asked. And that blurry viewpoint takes the edge off the panic long enough to dampen one's instincts to run straight to the woods.
Well, in many ways, the printing press did cause evil. The mass producing of Catholic religious texts in the 1400's neatly aligned with the time and place of the Spanish Inquisition and led to the rise of Europe’s most popular past time, witch hunting.
So rather than dismissing the concern around technological advancement as superstition, we might want to ask how women felt about the printing press putting a copy of the Maleus Maleficarum in every midevil incel's hand.
And while we're asking questions, how did the parents of the amputated children forced into factory work in Victorian England feel about the "innovation" of the steam engine? Or how Congolese child labourers in cobalt mines are currently feeling about the advent of the electric car?
Who benefits from technological innovation and who pays the bill?
John Henry was a Steel Driving Man
Thanks to the preservation of emotional data found in oral folklore and folksongs, we know a lot about how people felt about steam powered innovations. And what we learn is that the battle between man and machine is rooted in exploitation of the working class. John Henry may have beaten the steam powered drill with his hammer but his heart exploded from overwork in the process. It is not a coincidence that this cautionary tale originated in the folk song traditions of African American railroad workers.
The steam powered drill was an innovation celebrated by the private investors of the early railroads, those with local “agricultural interests” ie. plantation owners, for whom the railroad made the exchange of slaves for goods more efficient. But it was a previous invention, that of whiteness, that decoupled the mutual interests of working class European immigrants and enslaved Africans. Presently the steam powered drill is no longer in use while whiteness continues to divide and conquer the organizing potential of exploited working populations.
A quick history lesson that I hope illustrates what whiteness works to obscure:
1600’s to 1833 - The UK plays a central role in the transatlantic slave trade allowing it to establish colonies… fucking everywhere and amass a disgusting amount of wealth for the monarchy.
1730’s - The UK becomes the largest slave trading nation in the world.
1764 The Spinning Jenny is invented. Up until this time women handspun thread and made their own textiles at home, selling them piecemeal to a local merchant allowing them to make their own money while still attending to their children’s care. Sure the occasional predatorial Rumplestiltskin merchant prick could rip a girl off but who needs HR when you have 16 brothers and a crafty village hag?
7 years later the first water powered cotton mill was built, permanently shifting working men, women and children away from home and into factories, introducing pay-gaps between all three groups in descending order.
1785 the power loom is invented (sorry everyone that pivoted from spinning to weaving), the two machines took cotton manufacturing from accounting for 16% of the UK’s economy to 42%. This high volume manufacturing capacity quickly outpaced the local raw cotton supply.
1800, finished cotton textiles were the UK’s primary export, having solved their resource supply issues by utilizing established slave trade infrastructure to import cotton as well as tobacco from the Americas. Side note: The Revolutionary war between the US and UK did not stop trade. There were occasional wartime disruptions of the supply chain but ultimately trade continued and even increased immediately following the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
1800 also saw the popularization of the Magdalene laundry “charity” model, tested first in Ireland then exported throughout the empire. A prison model similar to todays privatized penitentiaries, wherein prisoners (in this case any woman that committed the crime of getting pregnant out of wedlock) are provided the fulfillment of their basic needs (barely) in exchange for long hours of industrialized labour that is sold by the prison for profit. Oh and also selling the babies to America once they were born without the woman’s knowledge let alone consent. The laundries were managed by the Roman Catholic Church, the first multinational corporation to not pay taxes in the location of it’s labour supply.
1811-1816, named for the apocryphal story of Ned Lund who was said to have smashed two factory stocking frames in a fit of passion, the Luddite movement originates in Nottingham and quickly spreads to the North West and Yorkshire. Their main activity was in the organizing and executing of machine breaking raids on cotton mills in protest of the poor working conditions, low pay and sub quality output of the machines. Mill and factory owners were given impunity in shooting Luddites on sight and soon the crown decreed execution and penal transportation of Luddites, crushing the movement under its fancy foot.
1825 cotton textiles are the UK’s main export.
1833 The UK passes the Slavery Abolition Act. The high volume manufacturing model that required less humans showed that the colonial slavery model based on maintaining plantations, was less profitable than free market industrial capitalism. Turns out paying for the squalid living conditions of slaves on plantations is more expensive in the long run than paying just a few of them next to nothing to work in factories. The official story they tell is that it was a moral decision. Following the passing of the Abolition Act, the British crown financially compensated slave owners throughout the empire for freeing their slaves. Additionally, a newly “free” person was subjected to a non-specific period of unpaid “apprenticeship” with their previous owners. Following that, in order to pay for the food and rent the plantation owner was now encouraged to charge, many would transition into indentured wage labour on those same plantations. Not to mention the UK continued to import slave picked cotton from the US. So ya, super moral.
THE VERY SAME YEAR of the Slavery Abolition Act, the first colliery town is built in the UK. A system by which a mine builds an adjacent town thus owning the workers' homes, schools and the stores that sell the food. Workers would pay off these accrued debts through the labour of all able bodied family members, male or female, age 9 and up.
Mid way through the American civil war, in 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation is uh… proclaimed? Taking a note from the UK’s book, ol’ Abe painted the Emancipation Proclamation as an act of moral righteousness when it was actually a war tactic intended to economically cripple the South. Which it did, ending the war 2 years later.
Late 1800’s, between the disruption of slave labour resource supply and other countries establishing cotton industries, UK monopoly on cotton textile exports ends. Their global economic dominance however, continues. Because guess who was exporting the steel, iron, machines and coal to fuel all the global industrialization they started?
With every technological “innovation” along this journey, working conditions for British labourers worsened dramatically. From working at home to cotton mills to coal mines, while British industrialists earned more money than should be humanly possible. Simultaneously the worst of all working conditions, those experienced by enslaved people, barely improved at all.
I ask again, innovation for who?
Something Old, Something New
The promise of automation as a reducer of stress and a calming of the burden of productivity shouldered by humans has always been a lie under industrialized capitalism. Sure some of us may have less physical labour in our lives but we also have more sedentary stress. Techlordz love to point to longer life expectancy as a metric of innovation benefitting humanity. Sure, medical innovation has extended human life but the current leading cause of death in the US is PREVENTABLE heart disease, a condition caused by the combination of a high stress/sedentary lifestyle. We have somehow figured out how to live longer, unhealthier lives.
Oh but the age of AI will usher in Universal Basic Income because the tech billionaires and the presidents that love them imagine themselves making so much money that it will be cheaper to pay everyone out and automate everything. But as was just mentioned, these large shifts in industrial innovation (think freed slaves working for the same guy for free) don’t change, they rename.
We can look to THIS YEAR for proof that technocrats have no interest in quality of human life. The mass automation of federal jobs in the name of “efficiency” alongside the dissolution of social supports like Medicaid and increase in military spending is just the Ghost of Capitalism Past up to its old tricks.
Capitalism DEPENDS ON a disenfranchised working class to churn out profit for the wealthy. Which is why Reagan and Thatcher tag-team befokked the middle class in the 80’s through the same combination of automation and defunding of social services. As a direct result of these policies, the cost of living has skyrocketed for the poor and decreased for the wealthy with Reagan famously cutting the top marginal tax rate from 73% to 28% over his 8 years in office.
Sad math; the median cost of a 1970’s pre-Raegan home was $17000 and is now $435 300. Adjusted for inflation $17000 is about $140 848 in todays purchasing power. Almost $300 000 or 69% of the price tag of a home is going tooooooo… ermmmm… well its definitely not social services, education, healthcare, arts and culture, public transit, environmental protection or animal welfare… could it maybe have something to do with the $997 billion military budget?
The leading causes of preventable heart disease induced stress in America are personal finances, the economy and work.
Fuck.
The Degrasse Defence
Recently, in an interview with Hasan Minaj, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, calm in his own personal job security, told us that when the automobile came on the scene, within 10 years all the horse and carriage related businesses had shifted to automobile related businesses and progress won the day. His view neatly aligns with the flag that every AI advocate waves in the debate around AI automating human jobs. It goes a little something like this:
“Sure this list of current real jobs will be made obsolete, but we project there to be tens if not hundreds of thousands of new jobs created.”
“Okay so exactly how many and what work do these jobs entail”
“What?”
“Exactly how many jobs and what kind of work are they?”
“Pardon?”
Neil would have us believing that the cost of innovation is worth paying, both the quality of human life costs and the environmental costs of high volume mass production. According to him it forces the best of us to use our human imagination to create something new. The best of us being the ones that have the money and agency to scrap their old horse and carriage businesses and pivot into the entirely new industry of the automobile. People with access to expendable capital for training and re-education, for mistake making, for the misreading of a chaotic new market, for putting in long hours uninterrupted by the needs of dependents, for investing in new equipment and on and on. The “best of us” sound a lot like… rich pricks?
Computer Says No
We’ve all seen the memes of AI going off the rails; blackmailing, stalking, threatening with violence, manipulation in the name of self preservation, racism, sexism… behaviours the tech industry calls “hallucinations”. Essentially, when an AI model misinterprets data, fills in gaps based on flawed patterns or draws from incomplete or biased training data they are “hallucinating” information that doesn’t align with reality. Or so that is how it is explained away. The thing is, these behaviours align too well with reality as though the Ghost in the Machine of AI is human ignorance itself.
LLM (large language model) AI’s are trained by first being exposed to a glut of text data and then refined by human programmers hired for their technical proficiency and not because they are psychologically sound people.
Using Grok as an example (Elon if you badly name one more thing I swear to Grok…), the main source of training data is its unique feature of real time connection to Twitter/X which Elon bought for this exact reason. Sit with that, Twitter/X is a live feed of data straight to Grok’s brain. If a book sneaks in to Grok’s training, its because someone on Twitter/X copied and pasted the text of said book into a post which happens never.
What would you expect from a child raised on a diet of Twitter/X and parented by Elon Musk? I would expect the list of shitty behaviour listed above and worse.
The subtext in these hallucinations goes beyond getting data mixed up, it manifests as behavioural expressions of the worst of human inclinations. And it sneaks in through the back door of the binary.
Humour me one last quick history:
Aristotle goes viral with logic; a system of deductive reasoning based on syllogisms or the practice of drawing a conclusion from two premises that are measurably true. Ex. Grok is a name. Terrible names sound like Grok. Therefore the logical conclusion is that Grok is a terrible name. The important bit to remember is that logic is deductive, a way of removing what can’t be measured in order to arrive at a quantifiable end.
336 BC Alexander the Meh, student of Aristotle, goes on a 13 year psychotic break, spreading logic through his imperial conquests that spanned from Greek and Egypt in the West to Central Asia and India to the East.
146BC Roman Empire conquers Greece eventually leading to the spiritual deduction from the sexy chaos of polytheism to the prudish order of monotheistic Christianity. As Romans loved to Romanize Greek things, Cicero runs ahead with Aristotlean logic, aligning its spread with that of Christianity.
476 AD. The Roman Empire falls but not until it has suppressed all ways of understanding the world outside of Christianity; oracle, metaphor, folklore, dream interpretation, nature worship and magic. All these ancient knowledge systems have been violently suppressed and/or co-opted and Christianity is the one true operating system of the Western World.
One, two skip a few…
1646 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a Christian Saxon rationalist (Christian rationalist is hilarious) is born and would come to develop a system of binary arithmetic that Westernized (ie. cleaved from the spiritual experience of human life) the work of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi’s algebra and the Chinese IChing . A mathematical expression of the core Christian concept of ‘creation ex nihilo’ (creation out of nothing) represented numerically in the absolutes of 1 representing existence and 0 representing nothingness.
1804 - The programmable Jacquard Loom is invented in France, allowing for intricate designs to be added mechanically to textiles through programmable punch cards, pissing off the English and leading to the mass unemployment of highly skilled, predominantly female, artisan weavers.
1833 Charles Babbage designs the Analytical Engine. Using Jacquard's idea of programming a machine through punchcard instructions, The Analytical Engine was intended for general use to perform mathematical calculations. His collaborator Ada Lovelace creates the first mechanical algorithm.
1847 - George Boole, a Christian English mathematician and logician writes The Mathematical Analysis of Logic. Taking Leibniz’s binary algebraic language and applying it to Aristotlean logic where 1 is true and 0 is false. Although for a long time Boole was considered a philosopher, his system formed the foundation of programming language.
1930 - Claude Shannon applies Boolean logic to telephone circuit design, laying the foundation for digital circuit boards. This innovation ramps up the automation of manual switching telephone systems which had been women’s work, to automated circuit exchanges. Fun fact, Claude AI is named after Claude Shannon.
1960 ALGOL 60 is developed using a Boolean data type, a landmark in the history of programming language development that paved the way for the information age.
1960’s onward - the computer programmer moves away from a clerical support role within computer sciences (ie. female dominant position) to one of technical prowess (ie. male dominant position). Today roughly 15% of software engineers, including LLM engineers, are female/ gender non conforming. As of a 2020 poll, white engineers make of 64% of total software engineers in the US.
One, two, skip a few more…
January 2025 - Seated in front of cabinet picks at Donald Trump’s inauguration are tech moguls Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
July 2025 - Donald Trump signs Executive Order 14179 “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence”, including the directive to eliminate references to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion within the existing risk management framework. Just a quick reminder here to the Little Miss Capitalist white girl bosses who are some of the most vocal detractors to DEI policies - of all demographics, white women were the single biggest benefactors of Affirmative Action. You have a successful Stanley cup customization business BECAUSE OF DEI POLICIES. Your proximity to rich pricks will not protect you from capitalism’s end game but DEI policies could have. Fucking doy-oys.
If AI is operating from a core value system of 0’s and 1’s inherited from Aristotle and Elon Musk is operating from a core value system of white supremacy inherited from his cult leader grandpappy, then… how could AI possibly understand the intangible value of humanity? The non quantifiable articulation of human life and our pursuit for meaning cannot be described by the binary because it is inherently illogical.
Imagine an LLM fed on millennia of oral folk wisdom from cultures around the world? From cautionary moral tales told by the people that lived the consequences like John Henry? From the best writing humans have to offer throughout history in every language? From hushed kitchen conversations between women through the ages? What guidance could it give humanity in navigating our collective unknown future?
Digital databases of transcribed oral folklore exist on the internet as do scanned books and therefore these things could technically be fed to Grok but why would a white guy making 6 figures program its prioritization when there is more North American/ Western Europe-centric human language data available via Twitter than all books, period?
And so we barrel forward with a syphilitic status quo.
We’ve all seen the bored-to-the-brink-of-dead-inside stares of the one human managing the self-checkout tills at the grocery store. This is what happens when the nuances of a human’s quality of life are not factored in to the economic equations driving AI development forward -death by boredom, at best. The biggest irony of all is that it is the misdirected quests for meaning (albeit run through a filter of white privilege, narcissism and bad-at-fucking) of the Musks and Trumps of the world that the rest of us bare the fallout of.
Meaning matters.
Ask Not What Your Robot Can Do For You But What You Prefer To Do For Yourself
The very act of deducing humanity down to 0’s and 1’s takes Aristotlean logic out of his own greater context. Not only did he often consult oracles, in his work ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ Aristotle asserts that there is one highest human good—eudaimonia (traditionally translated as "happiness" or "flourishing")—which is what good politics should target, because what is best for an individual is less beautiful (kalos) and divine (theios) than what is good for a people (ethnos) or community (polis).
But making beautiful, divine, socially beneficial AND logical electric circuits doesn’t make money, as Nicholas Tesla’s end of life net worth of $0 tells us. Because of this, AI can only ever be a superpowered simpleton within the limitations of Capitalism.
The final, and weakest argument I hear in favour of AI is “there’s no point in resisting it, its the future, you’ll be left behind.” Which as Hannah Arendt told us in no uncertain terms, is how monsters are made. Reporting on Adolf Eichmann’s Nuremberg trial in her master work “The Banality of Evil”, she describes how, more than Hitler’s mania, it was the ordinary people like Eichmann who stood by and failed to think critically about the consequences of their actions. She observed first hand that Eichmann wasn’t inherently malicious but rather lacked the capacity for independent thought and therefore moral action.
Because many of us spend the bulk of our days existing within a social media simulation of real life, we are being conditioned to think in binary terms. Research has shown that social media use correlates to an increase in political polarity but the popular explanation of this phenomenon points to the anonymity that social media allows us in venting the innate shittiness we otherwise suppress in real life. In the same way I don’t think men are seething bags of rape at their core, I don’t think humans are innately shitty. What I do think, is that communicating in and with binary language for the bulk of our waking hours, is changing our brains. The argument posing only two options; fall in line or get left behind, is just one example of the binary in action. It’s in the unexamined belief that those are the only options that we find ourselves abandoning our capacity for nuanced thought and more importantly, collective action based on the awareness of learned consequences.
Personally, I’m signing up for the getting left behind option. Every time I write something, like this long ass thing, without grammarly, I am strengthening my neurological synapses. Every time I turn maps off and pathfind my way through the city on my own, I’m charging up the electric circuits of my mind that are both beautiful and divine. Every time I do something simply because I can, even if it takes me longer, I salvage some meaning. And if one is to build a life outside the Technocracy, salvaged personal meaning may just end up being our most valuable resource.