AI wasn't made for you | Paris Marx

A 35-minute interview on The Tech Report with Paris Marx, host of the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us. Host Isaac Pound starts from Gallup’s finding that approval of unions in the US is at a high, and asks how much AI has to do with it. Some, Marx says, but not all. When the most powerful companies in the world say they want to take your job, workers look for leverage, and some layoffs credited to AI are really about freeing cash for data-centre spending. Growing inequality and the strikes of recent years, by auto workers and in Hollywood, matter as much. He also sees the tech companies winning ground back, pointing to the end of Microsoft’s neutrality agreement covering Activision Blizzard’s workers.

His central claim is in the title. The executives who tell staff to use AI are the same people who decide the layoffs, and they keep the gains, while everyone else carries the costs: a polluted information environment, harm to mental health, the local burden of data centres. He keeps the AI backlash and the labour story partly apart, though. Amazon workers on food stamps, for instance, belong to an older low-wage model that Walmart set first.

His history goes back to the 2010s, when robots and AI were meant to wipe out half of all jobs. What came instead was gig work, algorithmic management and surveillance: drivers filmed and timed rather than replaced. Generative AI, for him, is the next step. The goal is not to remove workers but to deskill and devalue them, as when a chatbot drafts and a lower-paid person revises. That also stops juniors from learning the job, and leaves programmers with code nobody understands. He allows that the host’s example, designers rehired at higher wages, may happen here and there, and expects the technology’s overselling to become plain as the hype fades, without the pressure on workers easing.

The checking backs most of it. Gallup’s 2026 poll put union approval at 71%, which ties the highest since the 1960s rather than setting a record: it ran at 73 to 75% in the 1950s. A Government Accountability Office report for Senator Sanders (July 2026) found the number of Amazon workers on food stamps and Medicaid nearly tripled since 2020. Microsoft’s neutrality agreement, signed in 2022, did expire this year. The teachers’ deal he half-remembers is the American Federation of Teachers’ AI training academy, funded by Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic (July 2025). The Canadian lawsuits concern the Tumbler Ridge school shooting in February 2026, where the shooter’s ChatGPT account had been flagged and police were not told. The Ontario auditor general’s report (May 2026) found that most of the 20 approved medical scribes made errors in testing, 12 of them recording the wrong drug: most products failed at least once, which is not the same as being wrong “more than half of the time”. His book, introduced on the show as Hyperscalers, is Hyperscale, due from Riverhead on 20 October 2026.