Why working as a butcher's boy made me feel like an earlier version of AI

Last week, when due in parliament at a very early hour, I stayed over in a hotel in Fulham, South-West London. This was where, as a 10-year-old, after the slums of Notting Hill and a Catholic orphanage, I arrived with my family to live in a block of council flats. 

It was here that I realised that I was a little proletariat. A worker, delivering meat and then paraffin as a means of beefing up the meagre family income. But a worker also in that I was like all my compatriots in labour, in that I served only one purpose: and that was to serve the interests of the propertied and the better classes. 

Managers in shops directed you in the harsh tones of the recently finished war; as if you were on national conscription in the army for that now-gone war.

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But more than that, it was the indifference that was perfected by the middle- and upper-class customers towards you. You were a machine. You had no personality, no history, no presence. You existed as little more than a piece of metal, but able to talk in order to deliver the order. Of course, I was not metallic but I felt I might as well be.

The crescendo of this feeling of not being human in this world, a precursor to AI, was being a butcher’s boy for the Queen’s butchers at Knightsbridge. Even then it was a supremely exclusive, rotten with money and class sort of place. There you moved off the pavement when a middle or an upper approached needing the pavement, deserving the pavement, more than you.

This was in 1960, just before John, Paul, George and Ringo, and Michael Caine, and Sean Connery, performers and actors, started to accumulate more money than the middle and uppers ever saw in their lives. So the world was tipping over towards the children of labour, but for the moment I was fully anaesthetised as a member of the working classes. And Knightsbridge was the place where, aged 14, I realised I was in the long line of pieces of machinery that built the pyramids and drained the swamp to lay out the Panama Canal. That built the Great Wall of China and all the myriad activities that built the world.

So when I look at recent debates about AI, I feel like doing what I have done above: identify myself as an earlier version of AI, from when oppressive class systems built monumental and extraordinary fabrics using the disposable labour and bodies of workers to provide the energy necessary to make something come into being. Whether that’s the world’s first underground – 1863 from London’s Farringdon to Baker Street, which involved turning men into machines until they dropped dead with fatigue. 

Women and children were not spared when the satanic mills of the early stages of the Industrial Revolution required bodies to risk the mills’ machinery – killers and maimers, but nonetheless essential to serving the interests of the middle and uppers who owned such grisly profit-making enterprises. And to think of the making-into-machines the stolen bodies from Africa, forced into the deathly hulks to cross the oceans to labour for the better classes of the Americas.

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AI has been around thousands of years and it is still a stain on human development that still haunts the minds and bodies of the enslaved and the enslavers. One of the reasons that human beings have reached such a crossroads of their development in a declining natural world is because of the accumulated harm mankind has done to mankind. The trauma that has sent us in the pathway of an addictive capitalism.

I caught a boy’s glimpse of this alienation when delivering meat up six flights of stairs, when the door was open and a young girl announced, “The meat has arrived.” And I was the piece of meat whose role was to deliver the meat to the uppers who lived at the top of the tradesman’s entrance. 

Perhaps I am being fanciful seeing AI in how we were treated as proletarians with no value or intelligence, other than delivery services to those who were truly human. If we surrender decision making to AI then will that mean we will become thicker and less able to find our way in the world, leaving all decisions to the artificial new intelligence?

I know that in the labouring masses was great talent and skill and all that. But now we are at a crossroads as addictive capitalism, always trying to find a new addiction to invest into, potentially closes down our lives and reduces us to little more than stimulators of machines. That way we become extensions of the machines themselves.

And we may well return to the slavery I found echoes of in my childhood days. Humanity has a fight on its hands as we are surrounded by gadgetry, opiates and distractions that turn us away from nature and life and into being the empty-headed consumers and wealth-builders of the new and old billionaires – some on the way to trillionaireship.

Fulham so echoes with memories of my early and largely stupid years. By the hotel entrance, when I was 20, I collapsed in a drug-drunk state and vomited on a policeman’s well-polished boot. Times have changed because they sent a copper around to my mum’s where my wife and baby were staying, and told her not to worry about where I was. And then escorted mum and wife to the police station where they castigated me for my unfatherly, unhusbandly behaviour. And walked me unsteadily home. Perhaps I was more of an unthinking automaton than I believed myself to be at the time.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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