Reclaiming Workers’ Ownership over Artificial Intelligence and Technologies

The technological automation led by Artificial Intelligence (AI) is growing on an unprecedented scale unknown in world history, immersing individuals and societies across countries and threatening both the environment and individuals with its negative impacts. It destroys millions of jobs, and human beings and their skills are replaced by robots (dead labour or commoditised human creativity). Technology invades every aspect of human life, where individuals do not have basic choices in life i.e. right to privacy. Therefore, there is growing resistance to AI-led automation, often branded as a “Luddite Renaissance,” which demands banning bots and technology, and slowing AI down before destroying it. Such technophobia is not an alternative.

Contemporary anti-technology movements and different forms of resistance against big technology companies, data corporations, their data centres, and AI are often branded as Luddite movements, creating a historical parallel with the workers’ uprising in textile towns of England in 1779. From Manchester to Nottinghamshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Leicestershire, and Derbyshire, textile workers protested against poor wages and inhuman working conditions after the introduction of automated power looms, knitting machines, and other machinery in the textile industries in England. They were also worried about the future of their hard-earned skills. The workers smashed the looms and machines to punish the textile industry owners. These struggles not only challenged ruling-class hegemony and factory owners’ domination but also brought nineteenth-century England to its knees.

The English ruling classes ruthlessly suppressed these early working-class struggles not only by deploying the brute force of more than 14,000 troops and gunning down workers and their leaders in Huddersfield and Yorkshire but also by imposing laws that made machine breaking illegal and punishable by death. The ruling classes also spread propaganda by branding the workers’ struggle against low wages and poor working conditions as an anti-technology and anti-progress movement. The ruling classes in England also branded these class struggles of the working poor as the “Luddite” movement, as a form of smear campaign that dismissed workers as simple-minded people who lacked foresight and opposed industrial progress in the country.

The workers used the ruling-class smear campaign to name their loom-smashing activities and claimed that workers were following orders from “General Ludd,” “King Ludd,” or “Ned Ludd,” a mythical apprentice. So, the working-class struggles in the textile towns of England were branded as the Luddite movement and used as a description for anyone who opposes or dislikes technology. The contemporary ruling classes, represented by the American Enterprise Institute, brand the anti-technology movement as “Luddite legerdemain.”

In reality, workers were not against technology or technological progress and industrialisation but against poor wages and exploitative and poor working conditions in factories. The textile workers had no technophobia; they demanded better working conditions, better wages, and workers’ rights.

However, despite the good intentions of environmental protection, workers’ rights, and the right to privacy, contemporary anti-technology movements—such as “algorithmic disobedience” led by the Algorithmic Sabotage Research Group, “decomputing society,” “decomputing for a better future,” “Welcome Spring, Burn a Tesla,” the movement for digital sovereignty, the Non-Aligned Technologies Movement, and other movements against big technology companies—show a neo-traditionalist approach to technology fundamentally opposed to the spirit of the Luddite movements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. There is no doubt that these movements are central to the humanisation, decentralisation, democratisation, and decolonisation of the technological divide and technological knowledge traditions. These movements caution about the impact of data centres on water resources and the environment and negative impacts of technology led digitalisation society on mental health. These movements remind people to reclaim their individual identity and privacy from big data companies and AI companies that reduce people, their behaviour, and their life experiences to mere numbers, codes and algorithmic models. These cautions are crucial in developing technology that empowers people and destroys all reactionary ideas and practices in society. Humanised technology for greater social good and protection of the planet is crucial, but an uncritical anti-technology movement takes society and scientific knowledge traditions nowhere. It looks backward.

From the creation of algorithmic language models and machines to the datafication of human lives, the codification of human behaviour, and the computerisation of human experiences, all are products and creations of human labour. Data collection, data entry, data classification, codification, management and analysis, and every other aspect of the origin, growth, and development of technology, its processes, and its products are the outcome of the creative abilities and human labour of working people. Therefore, it is imperative for working people to claim ownership and control over all AI-led technologies, both in terms of skills and knowledge traditions and in terms of their operational and organisational aspects. This is the only alternative that can further humanise, democratise, decentralise, decolonise, and decarbonise technology in the service of humankind and the planet.

Mere uncritical opposition to technology empowers the ruling class and its reactionary corporate cronies, who make profit by taking away workers’ rights from the very product workers produce in the form of creative knowledge and AI-led technology. The corporatisation of AI and commercialisation of knowledge traditions control human beings, their societies, and the planet. The alternative is to own, control, and direct technology to serve the people. Instead of opposing technology and accelerating a culture of technophobia and unfounded fearmongering claims by self-serving leaders of AI companies, it is time to claim workers’ ownership over all technologies and AI.

The historical trajectory from Luddite technophobia to anti-AI movements is missing the boat by failing to claim workers’ ownership over all forms of technology and its knowledge traditions. It is time to own AI before it owns all human beings and the planet under its rent-seeking culture and system of technological and digital slavery. Therefore, it is important to reframe and reorient anti-technology and labour movements from alienation to ownership in order to humanise technology and to ensure people’s ownership and control over AI.

It is imperative to pursue new frontiers of scientific and secular knowledge traditions in the form of AI-led technologies that are central to empowering and emancipating people, addressing the essence of human needs, and fulfilling human desires by dismantling the fraudulent claims of hyper-consumerism under the individualistic cultures of digital and platform capitalism. The call to ban, slow down, and destroy AI is neither an alternative nor a viable project for the progressive transformation of society and the emancipation of human beings. It only serves the corporate ruling class agenda. Therefore, it is time to reclaim workers’ rights and their ownership over AI. The collective ownership can only shape sustainable AI and help AI to survive from the onslaught of corporatisation, commercialisation and weaponisation of AI for profit. The new frontiers of AI and its sustainable development depends on collective ownership of AI.

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Bhabani Shankar Nayak is a political commentator