New Yorker: Please stop giving technologists a free pass, agricultural robots edition
This article by John Seabrook was just the latest technophilic puff piece from the New Yorker, which in this case tells the story of a generations-long systemic extraction of value and wealth from an oppressed people, transformed into a breathless and vapid reification of Silicon Valley mysticism around machine learning, self-driving vehicles, and gig-economy homilies. I enjoy and respect the New Yorker’s work, but they need to stop helping technologists spin this kind of idiotic dream, because it’s hurting people.
The story opens with the touching story of a first-generation farmer — whose “labor” consists of 650 people working for 25c per “clamshell” of strawberries (we’re assured that an “average” worker makes an average of $15 per hour, but no word on benefits, protections or rights). But what really pissed me off about this piece was its constant casual dehumanization of the people who do the work, while it eagerly recounted the technologies which will replace them.
I couldn’t let it go. Here are my notes, from start to finish:
The article consistently measured success and loss from the perspective of farm owners and agribusiness, omitting and eliding the costs to those doing the farm work. Getting visas for workers is “expensive” and “labor is scarce” — Seabrook describes people as a type of resource to be exploited, like land and water (he literally says this):
He sums up the oppressive conditions and human costs which immigrants face as simply “Years of attempts to crack down on illegal immigration,” describing it mainly in terms of a labor shortage and a problem of “getting berries picked”. And he spends only a single sentence on the abuses, including violence and sexual harassment, in the strawberry industry.
Maybe if we took these more seriously, we wouldn’t have “a labor shortage”?
Instead, Seabrook skips ahead to allow the farm owner to characterize physical harm which workers experience during this strenuous work as “getting less productive” and calling such working conditions “a young person’s game.” This kind of writing allows people’s bodies to be characterized as a kind of livestock, or consumable working material for capitalist progress. Please stop.
But the worst part is how he then pivots to how Silicon Valley innovation will solve it all. Though the piece starts by posing this as a question, it quickly adopts the framing of this as a labor shortage/tech innovation problem to be solved with AI, machine learning, drones, and GPS. Did you know that the word robot comes from the Czech word for forced worker?
If you’re going to try to be critical about technology (and… are you, even, John?) you need to spend some time trying to hear and understand the stories and acts of those who will be affected by it, and to see technology development for what it fundamentally is: an attempt to re-organize power. Now, let’s look at this stunner:
Wait, are you saying that these people have maintained crushingly low wages (among the lowest in the country) for decades, and yet are spending $10,000,000 on a robot named Berry to replace the very workers they’ve extracted this value from? How is THIS not the story?
Much of my outrage focuses on the way proposed solutions are recounted. We visit a group of startup idiots who think that using electric lights to grow crops in a warehouse is a good idea, though we’re not told if the power used is renewable (the robot ran on diesel, thanks guys), and Seabrook lets them claim that “the only things that ever come in [to the factory] are seeds.” That sounds likely; what about water, fertilizer, electricity, or again, workers?
Then things just get uglier, as Seabrook jokes about how workers may not be “worth” replacing if they make minimum wage:
The consistent barrage of unquestioned problematic ideas was exhausting. We learn that the inventors have patented a machine based on the motions of berry pickers. Were they co-inventors?
And while there is lip service to STEM retraining, for ‘the next generation,’ it’s superficial and vague, and, given the opportunity to clarify if current workers at the farm, or their children, are being offered such opportunities, Seabrook takes a pass.
Instead we hear more breathless robot love:
Next came the only actually good idea in the whole piece, but it read as a box-checking of “hearing the other side” rather than being taken as a serious suggestion, which it is. Thank you, Greg Asbed, of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, for stating what’s missing from the main narrative of this piece: this is about basic respect and dignity of workers, and has been for a long time.
CIW is an amazing organization, by the way, and probably should have been the subject of this piece in the first place. They have won multiple awards for their work against modern-day slavery in the U.S. agricultural industry.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is a worker-based human rights organization internationally recognized for its achievements in the fields of social responsibility, human trafficking, and gender-based violence at work.
The article wraps up with further denigration of humans and their work, with baked-in ideas that algorithms can (or should) make high-level decisions, and again a focus on the “poor conditions” for industries, rather than workers.
We’re left with the idea that exploiting workers is “brain work” but that those who do “grunt work,” far from having had their wealth stripped away by centuries of colonialism and capitalism, are just too stupid to know any better.
New Yorker, please do better.
