Monsters of Our Own Creation: AI, Occupational Solidarity, and the Soul of the Future of Work

Abstract: My paper addresses how we have navigated the advance of AI technologies across today’s economies and societies. In particular, it addresses a puzzle I encountered with regard to how we have navigated the notion of our humanness, and what we more broadly value enough to take with us versus leave behind, in this era of change. This puzzle came up as I was using ethnographic and interview methods to examine work seen as distinctively human – namely, artistic expression, in the form of music composition – and the occupational community behind it. While scholarship on occupational communities has tended to expect that members might push against threats like technological rationalization and protect the human beings of the community from being automated away, I discovered that members might instead spearhead such technological rationalization, in ways that threaten to automate away the community. The music composers at the heart of my study specifically used their experience with and understanding of the work of music composition to build an AI that composes music. And though they intended for the AI to be used by and even collaborate with other composers across the community, the AI ended up being used in video content production, to compete with and automate away the community. They, in turn, made sense of this situation by drawing on definitions of worth native to the community. Specifically, they drew on the fact that composers did not see the work that was being automated away as very human, in that it was not infused with much of what they called the composer’s soul. As such, the work, as well as those who did it, were not seen as worthy enough to protect, paving the way for them to be automated away.