‍ ‍AI did not invent the habit of treating workers as expendable. Fights over automation, water, and taxation reveal how much of that habit we are willing to carry into the future.

Labor Day was created to honor the people whose work produced American prosperity. It is an awkward holiday for an economy that has become increasingly sophisticated at obtaining work without accepting the obligations once attached to employment.

Labor economist Paul Osterman estimates that more than one in three American workers occupies what he calls a “disposable” job. His definition includes contractors, organizational freelancers and employees whose positions offer little security or opportunity for advancement. These are not necessarily short-term workers. Some perform essential work for years while remaining outside the durable relationships through which employers traditionally provided benefits, training and career prospects

The concepts of taxonomy and folksonomy hold significant implications, especially in the context of emerging technologies like OpenAI. While traditional taxonomies offer structured hierarchies of knowledge, allowing for a systematic approach to information organization, folksonomies represent a more fluid and emergent way of categorizing information based on user-generated tags and metadata.

However, the challenge arises when technological advancements fail to incorporate divergent thinking and promote groupthink through convergent taxonomies. This phenomenon is particularly evident in language models, where developers' linguistic and cultural biases can influence the interpretation and representation of (the dominant) language.

Is it ARTIFICIAL intelligence or AUGMENTED intelligence?

The truth? It depends on the design's purpose. An organization’s purpose is informed by its values and profit motivation. Artificial intelligence aims to create autonomous systems that can perform tasks without human intervention, while augmented intelligence seeks to enhance human capabilities by providing AI-powered tools and assistance.