Mercor, the Peter Thiel-backed AI training platform valued at $10 billion, recruits doctors, lawyers, bankers, and social workers to train their AI replacements. Speaking to Bloomberg last week, early investor Adam D'Angelo explained the company's young founders, who’ve never had actual jobs, were perfect because their minds hadn't been "corrupted by the conventional way of doing things." It was a bizarre way to admit only boys with underdeveloped frontal lobes and zero life experience would feel no sense of solidarity for workers. But SF’s psychopaths du jour arguably are arguably less venal than the doctors annotating scans for $250 an hour and the attorneys redlining contracts for $200. White-collar workers without unions still ought to consider themselves part of… something.
And that's not just a moral claim. Those engaged in self-liquidation may justify their behavior in terms of economic self-interest and inevitability, but there's no self-interest in treating automation as inevitable. It's just really, really dumb. Just ask a typesetter. When the Linotype arrived in 1886, a single operator could suddenly do the work of four hand compositors. The International Typographical Union looked doomed. But somebody still had to run the machines. The ITU agreed to do it — if, and only if, its members were the only ones allowed to touch the machines. Rather than shrinking, the union grew as newspaper margins increased. When computerized typesetting arrived eighty-eight years later, ITU Local 6, which included the typesetters for the Times, traded the Grey Lady the right to automate in exchange for lifetime employment guarantees. She made the deal because as well as new machines may work, monkey wrenches always work better.
