Some 100 trade unionists and activists gathered in Manchester on Saturday for a one-day conference, “This Is Not Inevitable—Standing up to AI and Big Tech”.
The event was co-hosted by the Campaign against Climate Change and the Greater Manchester Climate Justice Coalition. It formed part of the trade union year of climate action.
Speakers discussed the use of AI in the workplace to monitor workers and increase workloads and its potential to lead to mass layoffs.
Shireen Asaw from United Tech and Allied Workers, a part of the CWU union, told the conference, “Our people are using AI and building it and increasingly being told that they are being replaced by it.”
However, she warned against the industry hype that tells workers that machines have “become conscious” and are taking over livelihoods.
Instead, she said it is being used as a convenient excuse by bosses to make decisions about job cuts that they wanted to make anyway.
“AI doesn’t ‘think’, it predicts. It’s very impressive but it is not a magical machine,” she argued.
She explained that behind every AI system there are still workers monitoring its outputs and training the AI.
Often the work is outsourced to parts of the world with lower wages and fewer labour protections. The workers are not so much replaced, but hidden.
In a session on the environmental impacts of AI, Owen Espley from the Global Action Plan campaign group said that a typical data centre consumes the same electricity as 100,000 households. Despite the green claims of bosses, it is reliant on fossil fuels.
Mary Stevens from Friends of the Earth added that in Ireland the massive increase in the number of data centres is driving up people’s energy bills.
She said that data centres are the new fracking and and that we need the same kind of movement to oppose them.
Sheffield based resident doctor Rory Gibson discussed the campaign to keep Palantir out of the NHS.
The tech giant’s tools are used by the Israeli military in their genocide in Gaza and by Ice in the US.
He said the campaign had seen some successes. For example, Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board chose not to adopt the NHS Federated Data Platform run by Palantir.
Laurence Bouvard from the Equity union outlined how actors and performers had opposed the non-consensual use of their voice and likeness by threatening to strike. They were inspired by strikes by the Sag-Aftra union in the US.
Participants at the conference discussed whether to oppose all AI or whether some uses can be positive.
Researcher Anne Alexander introduced her talk by referring to herself as an AI abolitionist and said that the tech is incredibly destructive.
But Shireen argued that it could replace dangerous and repetitive work.
“Trade unionists are not against technology,” she said. “But it’s not neutral and reflects the values of the people who own it.”
