As artificial intelligence inserts itself into the American workplace, people are starting to worry about what might happen to actual human workers. Labor unions have become a political counterweight to some of AI’s potential harms, but the most venerable and powerful unions are also decades-old groups that struggle with social and technological change themselves. This weekend in POLITICO Magazine Tom McGrath profiled Liz Shuler, the president of the AFL-CIO, who has identified AI as a crucial challenge for unions to grapple with — and also as an opportunity for a movement that isn't always seen as part of the high-tech landscape. “She’s determined not only to return organized labor to a place in American life that it hasn’t occupied for decades,” McGrath writes, “but for labor to help shape our technological future.” Some excerpts: On last year’s Hollywood AI dust-up: “‘The Writers’ Guild got everyone’s attention because they were talking about the dumbing down or gig-ifying of their work based on AI,” Shuler told me when we chatted one day last summer. ‘They were being asked to just plus-up what Chat GPT writes for Hollywood. That is not only dehumanizing, but it’s taking away the creativity and the craft and dumbing it down to ones and zeroes. And it’s sort of woken up the entire country around the potential for this kind of technology and how it’s going to impact work.’” On labor's concrete plans: “At the forefront of [efforts to keep up with tech] is the Technology Institute of the AFL-CIO, a unit launched several months before [late AFL-CIO head Richard] Trumka succumbed to a heart attack and that Shuler has championed. Its portfolio includes convening member unions to talk about the impact of technology, as well as attempting to influence policymakers as they wrestle with regulating AI. (Both Shuler and Technology Institute executive director Amanda Ballantyne participated in the Senate’s AI Insights Forums last fall.) Maybe most notably, the Technology Institute is partnering with universities, including Carnegie Mellon, to provide worker input on new technology as it’s being developed.” On autonomous vehicles: “In one project with CMU, the Technology Institute arranged for union bus drivers to offer their perspectives on self-driving buses. In a subsequent white paper, CMU professors noted that while autonomous buses have the potential to improve safety, they’ll actually make operators’ jobs more complicated. What’s more, the report noted, self-driving technology is no substitute for the more human part of what bus operators do in attending to passenger needs (say, assisting an elderly person) and looking out for passenger safety.” Now big labor has a partnership with Microsoft: “‘Instead of [corporations] saying, OK, we’re going to tell you how the technology is going to be implemented, we need to actually be upstream in the development of the technology and have workers’ voices in those labs shaping what happens,’ [Shuler] says. ‘Unless you have the ability to come together with your co-workers and shape [technology], put guardrails around it, negotiate what your role is in it, then it’s not going to benefit us all in the way that it needs to.’ That’s the exact idea behind a first-of-its kind partnership the AFL-CIO and Microsoft announced in December. The new collaboration seeks to ensure that workers’ perspectives will inform the approach of Microsoft’s developers as they move forward with AI, creating a mechanism for labor to share insights and concerns with the people actually developing the technology. Equally important, the agreement also calls for Microsoft to remain neutral if any group of its U.S workers seeks to form a union and for the company and the AFL-CIO to work together on policy recommendations about AI.” On an “FDA for AI”: “‘For the most part technology is just thrown out into the marketplace, and it just wreaks havoc,’ [Shuler] says. ‘There’s no thought process — or safety mechanism or, heaven forbid, regulations — that can actually assess and model what’s going to happen before it happens. Like Chat GPT — it just showed up one day because Microsoft and OpenAI were like, look at this great thing we developed!... We need, like, an FDA for AI. You don’t put a vaccine out there without testing and going through the rigors of the scientific community and forecasting what’s going to happen. You need the same kind of approach for AI because it’s going to be equally impactful, and people will be harmed if we don’t think about and aren’t intentional about how we’re introducing things into our economy.’” On ChatGPT bringing white-collar workers into labor: “‘We think collective bargaining is actually the tool to manage this — labor and management sitting across the table, figuring it out together in partnership,’ she says. ‘If we have the trust, and if we can look around the corner and see a better future, we’re going to be partners in that, rather than resisting it… People are starting to see unions in a new and different light, because many people forgot that unions were the way to achieve a kind of justice in the workplace. Or they had a certain stereotype or perception of what a union was: Oh, that’s for industrial settings. Or that was before we had labor laws. Well, no, actually, it’s this thing called a union that enables you to come together with your co-workers for fairness on the job.’”
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| The European Union’s pursuit of regulatory leadership cannot be constrained by the bounds of gravity. As POLITICO’s Joshua Posaner reports, Brussels has turned its regulatory eye to space, with the European Commission planning soon to introduce the world’s first comprehensive space law (just weeks after passing the world’s first comprehensive AI law). According to Joshua, the bloc plans to introduce an “EU Space Label” that will certify products that are produced in an environmentally sustainable and cyber-secure manner. It will also track space debris, an increasingly serious policy issue in a sky lit up by more and more satellites. “In over 60 years of space activity, we have more than 60,000 objects that need to be tracked in space, and over 1 million [pieces of] small debris,” Christophe Grudler, a member of the European Parliament from France who is leading legislative efforts to build a European competitor to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service. “If we do nothing, we will no longer be able to launch satellites because space will be too cluttered."
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