Format: Invited Talk
Speaker: Frank Pasquale
Given their commitment to labor and consumer empowerment, platform cooperatives often need to operate on thinner margins than for-profit competitors. This means that AI will be a very tempting labor replacement for non-core elements of coops’ mission. For example, a cooperative restaurant might cut graphic design costs by using AI-generated posters and ads. Funders may demand an AI-composed microdrama from an entertainment co-op, eviscerating demand for writers while creating work for actors, grips, camera operators, directors, costumers, and others. A babysitting coop may find it far more efficient to use AI to run its communications and computation than advertising staff, public relations workers, and UX designers.
All these options raise the possibility of what Alex Williams and Jason Read have described as “negative solidarity:” an affective commitment to imposing the same competitive stresses on others that one has experienced oneself. They also demonstrate Jessica Silbey’s and Woody Hartzog’s theory that “AI destroys institutions,” in a manner reminiscent of John Maynard Keynes’s paradox of thrift. In many individual instances, it probably makes economic sense for one group of workers to use AI to avoid the expense and inconvenience of hiring outside personnel. However, if everyone follows this path, these social choices undermine the very expertise needed to assure that AI is actually operating optimally, and the value of labor needed to justify cooperativism in the first place.
A well-functioning polity can use regulation and licensing to preserve expertise, even amidst massive economic disruptions. However, most coops do not operate in such polities. They will rely on cultural values and economic developments that shift power. One such power-shift would be a new “oppositional solidarity” that undermines the political economy that makes AI’s demands so powerful. Both Ingrid Robeyns’ limitarianism, and resistance to the logic of the “garrison state,” are valuable here. Catholic social thought’s “preferential option for the poor” (POP) is another lodestar. This talk will conclude by exploring these two critical ideas (limitarianism and anti-garrisonism) and the positive ideal of the POP as normative frameworks for coops facing AI’s challenge to labor’s value and experts’ authority.
Reporter 1: Frank Pasquale
Reporter 2: Kanikka Sersia
Speakers
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Frank Pasquale Professor of Law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School