Technology AI, Science and New Things
The US port strike has come to pass, halting work at major dockyards along the East and Gulf coasts. Around 45,000 dock workers in the International Longshoremen’s Association union walked off the job on Tuesday after talks collapsed over a new contract. The union wants a $5-per-hour wage increase each year for six years and a total ban on automation of gates, cranes and container-moving trucks. Its rage against machines isn’t new, but the arrival of AI has given it a new urgency. Video game producers and Hollywood screenwriters have struck over AI protections in the past year, and as one academic put it, people who previously thought they couldn’t be replaced by machines are “probably looking to groups like the longshoremen and thinking, ‘Wait a second, actually, I may not be that far removed from this’”. It’s a self-fulfilling process: the more jobs are lost, the fewer members unions have.
