The artificial intelligence boom has given new life to the ongoing debate over who gets to decide how new technologies shape society. Organized labor has increasingly elbowed its way into that debate, as some of America’s most prominent unions have used the threat — and potential promise — of AI as a wakeup call for workers whose jobs might be affected by it. In a new partnership with the National Science Foundation, shared first with Digital Future Daily, the country’s biggest labor organization will be involved in the research process for new technologies that could transform service work and other forms of manual labor. The AFL-CIO’s Technology Institute will announce today an ongoing collaboration with the NSF, in which the two groups will explore how labor can consult on the foundation’s cutting-edge research projects in fields like AI, quantum computing and semiconductors, among others, to better ensure those innovations help American workers. Details are scarce on what that collaboration will actually look like in practice, but both the AFL-CIO and President Joe Biden’s administration say they’re committed to figuring out how scientists can bring labor into the loop. The government has been promising to do this for a while: The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act includes language directing the NSF was directed “to further the creation of a domestic workforce capable of advancing, using, and adapting to” new technologies like AI, biotech and advanced manufacturing, and to help develop technology that would “complement or enhance the abilities of workers.” The idea also mimics collaborations the AFL-CIO’s Tech Institute has headed up with Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft. With Carnegie Mellon, Tech Institute has been soliciting feedback from bus drivers on automated transit, and with Microsoft, they’ve developed a system for labor leaders to deliver feedback on their products directly to developers. Partnering with academia and private industry, however, is very different from partnering with government — especially with an election on the horizon and control of Congress hanging in the balance. For as much noise as some figures in the GOP have made about redefining their party as pro-labor, labor officials acknowledge that research funding priorities aren’t likely to redound to their benefit if Republicans win big in November. “It’s clear that the candidates running for president have very different approaches to science and science funding, and I would say that's true also for Congress,” Amanda Ballantyne, director of the AFL-CIO’s Technology institute, told DFD. She said she hopes the next Congress and administration usher in “a significant group of people who are interested in creating tech solutions that work for everybody in our society, which I think can be a bipartisan issue.” In an interview with DFD, Ballantyne said that the project would bring in workers to review new tech proposals and provide their input on their feasibility and effectiveness. A 2023 report from the McKinsey Global Institute projected that activities accounting for up to 30 percent of the total hours worked could be automated by 2030, with AI contributing to an already ongoing decline in the total labor participation rate. “There are broad trends that cut across all industries, like scheduling or other types of automated management systems, that we can look at and redesign in ways that not only benefit management, but also help workers instead of harming them,” Ballantyne said. NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan echoed that sentiment in a statement, pitching the program as “foster[ing] economic opportunity and upward mobility for everyone in every corner of the country.” With big chunks of money missing from the “Science” part of the CHIPS and Science Act even under the Biden administration, ambitious re-imaginings of the research process like this one might face a tough fight for resources in Washington no matter what. But Ballantyne remains sanguine about the collaboration, saying that previous efforts like those with Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft show that an ongoing, mutually beneficial partnership between labor, research and policy is within reach. “Workers and unions have a big stake in how innovation and industrial policy work,” Ballantyne said. “It's not like you're installing a telephone pole and then just putting some wires on it. These technologies grow and change and adapt, so there needs to be a system in place for monitoring and policymaking around them.”
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