Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work
Good Fit
- Readers who want to approach the "techno-utopian" narrative around AI from a critical/Marxist perspective
- Readers interested in the thesis that technology is never "neutral" but shaped by capital's interests
- Readers who want to read a collection of essays by international academic authors (Riccardo Campa, David Spencer, Kim Moody) in one place
- Readers who want to trace changes in the world of work through concrete examples like Amazon, platform economics, and the "gig economy"
Not a Fit
- Readers seeking a neutral, non-ideological look at AI's economic impact — the book is openly written from a Marxist perspective
- Readers who take an optimistic/techno-utopian view of technology and support "post-scarcity society" arguments — the book directly critiques these
- Readers looking for a single-author, single-voice monograph — this is a multi-author academic essay collection
Koşar takes the cheerful-worker photo on Amazon's job site as a symbolic case study — a woman in a high-visibility vest, laptop in hand, appears to be "enjoying" her work, but Koşar reads this as concealing long hours, mobbing, and low pay.
The author argues that AI leaps like ChatGPT and DeepSeek are presented (citing Brynjolfsson and McAfee) as a path to a "post-scarcity society," but calls this a naive belief that class, gender, and race-based exploitation will simply dissolve through technological evolution on its own.
Elon Musk personally altering X's algorithm in 2023 to boost the view count of his own Super Bowl tweet (per journalist Zoe Schiffer's reporting) serves as concrete proof that AI is never "neutral."
Koşar quotes physicist John D. Bernal's 1938 observation that scientific research is controlled by monopoly, not competitive, capital — and backs it with current statistics (79% of R&D spending in the US, 67.4% in Germany is corporate-funded; Amazon alone spent $85.6 billion on R&D in 2023, more than five times Turkey's entire national R&D budget).
The chapter lists four ways AI reshapes labor markets: displacing workers outright, deskilling jobs and driving down wages, creating new areas of commodification (like e-commerce), and fragmenting work through platform economies that drive down wages via global competition.
- A classic Marxist-critique structure, opening with concrete, recognizable examples (Amazon, Elon Musk/X) before moving to theoretical generalization
- Economic argumentation backed by statistical evidence (OECD, TÜBİTAK figures)
- Ties current events to a long-running critique of capitalism through historical references (the 1938 Bernal quote)
- An anthology format — each chapter belongs to a different international academic author, with Koşar's Introduction setting the overall frame
The same author's earlier book devoted to technology and labor
A work analyzing contemporary capitalism through a similar critical-economic frame
A similarly Marxist-perspective examination of automation and the future of work
While the Introduction lays out only the general critical framework, the book is divided into three parts: "Framework" (Riccardo Campa and David Spencer's scenarios for the future of work), "The Quantity of Work" (including Koşar's own essays, a methodological critique of the technology-employment relationship, and Kim Moody's "high tech, low growth" thesis), and "The Quality of Work" (gender inequality, the Amazon-panopticon metaphor, and platform workers' hidden labor).
The final essays take a deeper look at the platform economy (Uber, Upwork) — using an Argentine study to examine how paid and unpaid work time are counted, and discussing unions' prospects for survival within the platform economy.
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