AI, Linotypes and Labor

 

(first posted on Medium Jan. 14, 2024)

Is anyone old enough to remember these behemoths in action?

A dark basement held 50 or more of these 8 foot tall monsters at the newspaper plant I worked at in my 20s, around 1974. They and the whole workspace had been used to typeset the daily news not that long before, and the room had been filled with workers at the composition boards. Little slugs of metal holding backwards letters and words were lined up in trays that were then used to make heavy rubber plates of each spread that were printed on newsprint on the floor above us. These ancient machines were crowded into corners in the dark, like silent ghosts. I never saw one in action, so the details are forgotten, except by Wikipedia and art printmakers.

We were doing ad pasteup with phototypesetting in a tiny corner of the basement, brightly lit like an island in a black sea of past technology. We 15 or so were on the graveyard shift, from 10pm to 6am, wielding our Exactos on photo printouts of artwork and text that we ran through wax machines and then positioned and burnished on a board. It seems pretty quaint now, but I miss those hands-on days, with the big tables, rolling t-squares and tall stools. Pasteup was a creative enterprise back then, and I was pretty good with a blade. No surprise I went into graphic design later, continuing to cut and paste my layouts until the desktop publishing era arrived which, again, destroyed jobs and made old technology obsolete.

As we watch AI take over the supposedly human-touch skills that we thought were safe, please remember that Capitalism abhors human labor, and always has. No matter how cool the technology, the question remains, does it make the society as a whole better? Or does it just benefit the owners and stockholders of the monopoly that offers it. Just because you can do a thing doesn’t mean it’s not going to cause upheaval, unemployment, poverty, suicides and depression. But hey, that corporate bigwig just bought a new mega-yacht, so it must be worth destroying 3 or 4 huge print-related industries and the lives they supported. And the software is so freakin’ cool!

I’m not advocating the return of Linotype. But all this new technology has a cost and a challenge: what to do with all that archaic human labor. We’ve been told since the 70s that robots were going to take our jobs, but crickets from above. No corporation or government official has come up with an answer other than UBI, not a terrible idea in these days of price gouging, but not near a full solution. What do we do? How do we spend our days, and our paltry basic incomes? How disposable do we become then for government and corporations who don’t like to face the human cost of their business decisions?

I lost major clients to desktop publishing and ironically also taught the software to the printhouse stripping teams that also got anachronized practically overnight. I was lucky then, that I could pick up the new tech easily, but these older men, experts in their field, weren't all that interested. ‘But who cares about them? They retired early. Look what Quark can do! ‘

This story was repeated just 10 years later, when I went into web design and programming to keep ahead. Each new platform got slicker and easier to use, and more homogenous in style. Design became a matter of settings. Literally any person could design a website, as long as it was pre-programmed. And who cared if the kerning was crap, look at this spiffy javascript module! So I retired early too. I started my career with U&lc and ended it with Wix.com. Sad.

The environment now, where billionaires own all the media, and whole departments are being vaporized to serve the online market, is just more of the same. The world of print design is almost extinct. The wide array of vehicles for design in the 90s — newsletters, magazines, posters, invitations, annual reports, print ads and more — has been shrunk down to the size of a phone screen and a short scroll of clunky fonts. Design is secondary to screen real estate parceling, and once gorgeous magazines are ugly and buggy and impossible to read.

I can’t say I’m surprised at all that AI has overnight usurped original art and text of all forms, taking down another slew of jobs formerly held by humans. If designers, illustrators, copywriters and other creatives don’t bite the bullet and learn how to prompt an AI properly, there will be far more retirees. Expertise will be meaningless, and even a liability. And the business owners will pocket the difference that they saved hiring a kid with an iPhone over you.

I hate to be a Cassandra, but the outlook is not good for my former profession. I watched it turn itself inside out as each tech innovation came and then was usurped by the next. Each wave is designed to fling off human labor as so much seafoam. Capitalism is designed that way.