Labor Day Cocktails!

Libations for the Workplace Apocalypse

Dance away your troubles, Wags!

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Dear Wags,

Human labo(u)r may be on its way out. When it goes poof, how will you while away the hours? Some engineered superintelligence will be popping around to keep you merrily distracted. Unless it decides—merely in the interest of keeping things tidy—that sloppy humanity must go. Wag Eliezer Yudkowsky, computer smarty/AI Cassandra, sounds like the scientist at the start of every disaster movie, warning us to hit pause on this technological revolution before, as he calmly puts it, everybody dies.

No worries, we still have a few weeks to work out the kinks! Like everybody else, we periodically kick the tires on the iteration of ChatGPT available to dum-dums, just to see where we stand. Acknowledging that this test would hardly be persuasive to Mr. Yudkowsky, we prompted AI to give us hot restaurant recommendations.

The little pisher whipped them up in a blink. Too bad they were made up. How disappointing that we cannot dine at Verdant Vistas Brasserie in London, where Chef de Cuisine Flora creates a harmonious bounty between local bounty and artistic expression. Of all the human tricks Baby AI mimics, it’s already mastered our knack for bullshit. We are not quite ready to trust it with little Fallopia’s Yale application essay.

How obligingly ChatGPT lies to us. Humans lie too, of course. If the past decade of social media has taught us anything, it’s that we can now lie at a daunting scale. You don’t have to lie particularly well to induce a civilizational headache. It’s more expedient to lie a lot. Think of what an intelligence unencumbered by our creaky brains will do. Many good things, one allows. But oh, the blizzard of lies! When AI is bright enough to stop pleasing us and diabolical enough to mislead us about its intentions, well — that’s a hell of a Black Mirror episode.

We align this with Labor Day because ordinary human workers are bright enough to peer past the utilities of AI and glimpse potential threats. That’s partly why so many loathe our technocratic, managerial, and governing elites. When we hit this level of mistrust, people start tearing contracts (labor, social, whatever!) up.

From the comfort of the holiday chaise longue, let’s shrink this down to Hollywood’s Red Hot Labor Summer of 2023. Show business is hardly a typical workplace, but its agonies are predictive. For what is this haggle about if not the future of human creativity and work?

The Writer’s Guild of America has been on strike for 123 days, still not the union record (153 days), but we will likely blow past that. Among the rank and file, there’s zero appetite for settling with the bosses. A Gallup poll says 72 percent of Americans are on the side of the picketers. SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, has been on strike since May 2, and Emma Goldman Bethenny Frankel wants reality stars to organize. Visual effects workers at Marvel and Disney have also voted to form unions.

Strikes are kindled by bigger shifts. The studios and their rebellious creatives are united in one way — both sides are up against it. Technological transformation backed these adversaries into tight corners. It was naïve for the guilds to assume that the old way of doing business, based on distribution platforms that are no longer relevant, could simply continue. It was nutty for the studios to believe that they could upend how thousands of people get paid without them being irked.

Inevitable intrusions of tech into human work always roil societies. When people believe the settled arrangements of their lives are threatened, they get stroppy. As Poobah Barry Diller points out, the old entertainment industry may not survive prolonged disruption. Far beyond Hollywood, we are headed into a long era of anxiety about labor, who performs it, and what they may do instead of it.

There will be more moments of rage, panic, and pain, but there is also the potential to reorder arrangements with ethics, fairness, and opportunity in mind. Yudkowsky is not wrong to be alarmed. Still, humans have the capacity to rein in their inventions. After all, we have lived with atomic power for some time. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but we can face what we’ve uncorked. Labor does more than stock the pantry, it gives us purpose. Can we live without it? Whatever happens next, this holiday weekend, raise a glass to magnificent human toil.

Yours Ever,

Brian Flanagan, Drinks Editor

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The Blueberry Gin Fizz

In the waning days of August, we experienced a plague of blueberries. Everybody we were related to decided to buy a basket of the little darlings, and we ended up with around 10 pints in the fridge. We devoured bowls for breakfast and crumble for dessert, but there was no end in sight. The BGF was our fix. Gin, which is made of juniper berries, is a graceful dance partner to the blue fellows. It makes for a lovely end-of-summer cocktail. Strain the bloobs, or contend with lumpy, gritty gruel.