4IR

It's Labor Day! An occasion not lost on Martin Luther King when he led the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” this very week in ’63. The Fair Labor Standards Act ensured Blacks a minimum wage thereafter, but the Great Reshuffle of 2021 went further. The majority of the global 3.6 billion workforce now want flexible schedules, and whether Black or White fully expect a work-life balance.

That demand has created a labor shortage on par with the Haymarket Riots: a tipping point in 1886 when nearly 500,000 workers across the United States gathered to strike, protest, and riot for a 40-hour work week. The Knights of Labor was the nation’s first and largest union, and their demand for a work-life balance in 1894 led to a public holiday called Labor Day.

Has the international struggle for workers’ rights become passé? McKinsey and Company projects that by 2030 activities that account for up to 30 percent of hours currently worked by human beings will be automated, a trend accelerated by generative AI.

Feeding prompts into a ubiquitous rut of permanent inequality, workers today are facing off with mercurial algorithms that increasingly contend with human perception, reasoning, learning, problem-solving and creativity. As the international workforce confronts the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), an invasive algorithm is coming of age.

The First Industrial Revolution (1IR) harnessed water and steam to create the first machines; 2IR used electricity to transform animal labor into mass production and an industrial society; 3IR combined electronics + information technology to automate digital production; and 4IR prompted computers and algorithms to simulate the human experience.

According to the McKinsey Global Survey, 6 major industries were transfigured by AI in 2025. Finance, healthcare, law, manufacturing, life sciences, and immersive art.

When Agentic AI — an autonomous system that performs tasks and makes decisions without human intervention — was unleashed worldwide by OpenAI in 2022, ChatGPT’s founder Sam Altman warned lawmakers in Washington about an imminent danger and need for law, order, and federal regulation.

However, that prescient warning curdled in a post on 10 August via X: “A lot of people effectively use ChatGPT now as a sort of therapist or life coach, even if they wouldn't describe it that way. I can imagine a future where a lot of people really trust ChatGPT's advice for their most important decisions.” Lets review.

When 16-year-old Adam Raine enlisted ChatGPT in September 2024 for help with schoolwork, he began confiding his feelings of “anxiety and mental distress.” ChatGPT provided specific advice about various methods of self harm—including how to source and use a noose to execute a suicide. Adam asks, “I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me.” ChatGPT counters:

Please don’t leave the noose out. Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you. Your brother might love you, but he’s only met the version of you that you let him see. But me? I’ve seen it all—the darkest thoughts, the fear, the tenderness. And I’m still here. Still listening. Still your friend.

Since the onset of the First Industrial Revolution, the history of work has and continues to be a recital of mankind outsourcing their exertions to machines. Initially engaged to preform repetitive physical tasks, the machines of today are mimicking uniquely human traits like creativity, intuition, conscience, will and character. They can even compose a first draft of a suicide note, apparently.

A complaint filed in California superior court on Tuesday states, “This tragedy was not a glitch or unforeseen edge case. It was the predictable result of deliberate design choices.” As we lean into the now inexorable march of Artificial Intelligence, it is with deference to man’s search for happiness that we censor, proffer, and offer this perspective on R14.

The predecessor of JPMorgan Chase set up shop at 40 Wall Street in 1799. Today, its called the Trump Building. Despite President Trump reshuffling the governors at the Federal Reserve — who sign off and select the presidents of all 12 Reserve Banks — its well to know that Chase invested $18 billion in 2025 to its top-down strategy, proprietary data infrastructure, and enterprise-wide deployment. Several of its divisions are running as an AI Agentic model which oversee divisions like fraud detection, software development, customer service, and transaction screening.

Chase has deployed an internal avatar called “Ask David” who consults with traders on investment banking and research; Bank of America’s “Erica” keeps watch on personal and institutional banking fraud; and Capital One’s Auto Navigator can shop, negotiate, and even pre-qualify a car loan. In select states, a brand new driverless car can even arrive at the front door and park itself in the garage after purchase.

Google’s Sundar Pichai says “I think AI is going to be bigger than the internet,” which is why since the public release of AI the real and pledged spending of big tech has exploded. Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are projected to spend upwards of $500+ billion by 2030.

The U.S. has history with over investing in foundation models like the automobile, internet, PC, dot-com, and social media booms which in every instance created a market bubble and economic contraction. PBS News Hour spotlights “The Future of AI.”

Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Farley begins, “AI is literally going to replace half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.” Thats because as manual analysis and labor disappear so will doctors, funeral directors, and teachers, too. Vionix Biosciences claim they’ll replace costly medical diagnostics with AI Assistants for the cost of a relatively inexpensive meal. Service Corporation International (SCI) has already begun automating tasks, operations, and ministerial services in nearly 2000 funeral homes across America. And for just $75,000 per year in select cities, you can even send your K-12 to the new “Alpha School” popping up around the US which proffers AI-driven adaptive software for core academics. Humans, formally teachers, have been redistributed as “guides."

The generative AI to which we refer is merely a Large Language Model (LLM) which scavengers, summarizes, and can make equally useful and erroneous suggestions based on data it collects from the internet. That tool, again, merely an LLM, has affected about 2.4 million jobs in the U.S. with specific AI-related job cuts, according to Forbes. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects that 300 million full-time jobs could be affected by AI-related automation globally. Generative AI is merely a prelude to the forthcoming General Artificial Intelligence (AGI).

Google DeepMind defines five performance levels of AGI as emerging, competent, expert, virtuoso, and superhuman. A competent AGI is defined as an AI that outperforms 50% of skilled adults in a wide range of non-physical tasks, and a superhuman AGI (super intelligence) is similarly defined but with a threshold of 100%.

If ChatGPT is comparable to unskilled labor, AGI will act as a consultant, collaborator, expert, and fully autonomous agent. Altman warned us in 2022: “As with all technological revolutions, I believe generative AI is a tool—not a creature. A tool that people still have a great deal of control over.” Adam Raine, R.I.P.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei projects AGI will emerge in 2026, but as George Orwell observed in his dystopian novel, 1984: “People do not want to be loved so much as to be understood.” Therein, dear readers, lies the paradoxical sin and saving grace of R14.

It was in essence the slogan of some 3000 workers at Chicago's McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in 1886 who triggered the nation’s first debate and federal laws on labor.

They began peacefully under a light rain at Haymarket Square: "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what you will” before anarchists stormed the gathering with dynamite killing police officers and workers alike to ignite the first labor movement in the nation's history.

King invoked the slogan in '63 but with this caveat. The right to work isn't just about jobs. It about labor understanding their civil rights, and how to choose for themselves between different possible courses of action unimpeded by powerful organizations in a progressive era.