Designing AI tools to benefit workers – Florian Butollo

Continuing our series on artificial intelligence, AI can augment human work--if workers' representatives have a voice in implementing it. The discourse on artificial intelligence and work is shaped by conflicting narratives. Disempowering notions about mass unemployment and a loss of human control in the face of ever-more-powerful machines are widespread. But AI also inspires visions of human empowerment, according to which labour will be upgraded as machines support human effort and relieve us from the burden of onerous work, leaving us with more interesting, creative and cognitive tasks. Both narratives are one-sided, deriving projections as to the future of work from the nature of technology as such.