by Xiaowei Wang
The desire for a controlled world arises from an inability to honor the unknown. “Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas”; we think that “the brain alone will set us free,” wrote the poet Audre Lorde in 1977.7 As a writer and activist, Lorde experienced firsthand the connection between the personal and the political, asking us to question the historically conditioned ways we have been taught to understand the world. “The white fathers told us: ‘I think, therefore I am,’” she says, referring to the Enlightenment-era philosophers who dissected knowledge as a technical, mechanical pursuit, rather than seeing forms of knowing as a reservoir of opacity, felt and lived through poetry. She asks us to move beyond dichotomies of rational versus emotional ways of knowing, for “rationality is not unnecessary … I don’t see feel/think as a dichotomy.”8 Beyond binaries, it is the place of poetry, “that back place, where we keep those unnamed, untamed longings for something different and beyond what is now called possible, to which our analysis and understanding can only build roads.” Poetry is a place of power within each of us, and poetry is “the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom.”9
I imagine that these tech leaders who envision an AI world also want to get free, they want some kind of freedom, at least for themselves. They claim we will witness freedom from work via robots, allowing us to rethink what it means to be human. And while I see the seductiveness of that proposal, I stray and meander, not to the project of being human, but toward the poetry of living. The end of humanity under AI bears no threat to anything that lies under the baggage of being human: naked, bare life, a responsibility to our lives and others.
On the ground, the bulk of AI research is being carried out by large companies like Alibaba. The realm of AI ethics and public discourse is saturated and funded by those same companies, like Microsoft, Google, and Baidu, and corporations directly manipulate the creation of ethical frameworks.10 It takes millions of dollars to create AI models like ET Agricultural Brain, and an enormous amount of computation time and data labeling. The economics of these technical requirements concentrate control over these models in a handful of companies. The broader AI industry requires a massive amount of data, and subsequently, companies advocate for lax government restrictions on collecting data. Until the makers and builders of AI solve the material realities of the technology, AI will be stuck in a downward spiral, as a tool to optimize life, shaping it into a closed system. Without questioning the intrinsic faith held in prediction, or the political economies of building algorithms, the field of AI ethics and algorithmic fairness will remain mere fodder for dinner party conversations among the rich.
There is so much potential for AI to serve life, to expand the open systems we do live in. I think of the difference between AI helping doctors diagnose and identify disease versus AI replacing the human social service worker who determines whether someone should receive medical benefits. Once a model is trained, it can be rapidly deployed and scaled to many communities. There could be scenarios where an AI model helps countless small-scale fisheries across the globe examine weather patterns, getting rid of the need for expensive forms of expertise. This stands in contrast to the current economics of AI, which would lean toward an expensive, corporate AI model that demands small fisheries become industrial fish farms to recuperate costs.
For ET Agricultural Brain, so much labor goes into making the models: not just the labor of engineers at Alibaba, but also the labor of those who create the training data. Farmers examining training data and labeling the pig in the images as sick or healthy. Entire swaths of Guiyang designated as “digital towns,” where young rural migrants sit and generate training data for AI, clicking on images, tagging animals and objects. Despite stories of AI replacing humans, AI still desperately needs us.
That is the reality of work and labor. For more than twenty-five years, my mother woke up at 4:00 a.m. and drove to her job as a university cafeteria worker outside Boston. She used to have a deep commitment to her job, and it gave her a sense of fulfillment. It felt good to feed stressed-out college students who weren’t taking care of themselves. She and her coworkers were trusted by management, given breaks and autonomy on the job.
Over the past ten years, her feelings of fulfillment have drastically turned. The school optimized her work with arbitrary, quantitative metrics. As a result of this optimization process, there’s less autonomy, fewer breaks, and new, bizarre working schedules. My mother feels little connection to her job now. My mother’s is the kind of job that some people think robots should take over, that should be optimized and automated. After all, she would supposedly get more free time and fulfillment in life. The irony is, she stopped feeling fulfilled when her workplace became optimized, her work stripped of meaning, turned into mere labor.
Examining the relationship between work and life under automation is not new. In a 1972 article in The Black Scholar, the activist James Boggs argued for the importance of thinking one level deeper about work itself. The problem facing jobs and work isn’t merely “automation and cybernation,” as he put it. Instead, the real challenge is “to create a new human meaning for Work as Working for others rather than for oneself; working for people rather than for things.” Transforming work into abstract, quantifiable, optimized labor erases “any of the human and social purposes or the creative satisfactions that Work has always had in other societies.”11 It is easy to automate work using AI once you’ve made work devoid of meaning.
Like so many AI projects, ET Agricultural Brain naively assumes that the work of a farmer is to simply produce food for people in cities, and to make the food cheap and available. In this closed system, feeding humans is no different from feeding swaths of pigs on large farms. The project neglects the real work of smallholder farmers throughout the world. For thousands of years, the work of these farmers has been stewarding and maintaining the earth, rather than optimizing agricultural production. They use practices that yield nutrient-dense food, laying a foundation for healthy soils and rich ecology in an uncertain future. Their work is born out of commitment and responsibility: to their communities, to local ecology, to the land. Unlike machines, these farmers accept the responsibility of their actions with the land. They commit to the path of uncertainty.
After all, life is defined not by uncertainty itself but by a commitment to living despite it. In a time of economic and technological anxiety, the questions we ask cannot center on the inevitability of a closed system built by AI, and how to simply make those closed systems more rational or “fair.” What we face are the more difficult questions about the meaning of work, and the ways we commit, communicate, and exist in relation to each other. Answering these questions means looking beyond the rhetoric sold to us by tech companies. What we stand to gain is nothing short of true pleasure, a recognition that we are not isolated individuals, floating in a closed world.
As the subway gets closer to Shanghai, it weaves past rivers and farmland. More and more passengers get on, more and more apartment buildings appear out the window. It gets louder, with teenagers in their school uniforms getting on the train, watching videos on their phones. An old grandmother holds her grandson’s Totoro backpack as he nibbles a wafer. Shan’s stop is coming up. She gives me a big, encouraging smile before she walks out of the subway car. “Merry Christmas!” she says. “Don’t spend it alone!”
4
Buffet Life
1.
Sun Wei is twenty-five years old. He’s portly, with a pleasant, round face and a slight lisp, sporting a short ponytail with a shaved undercut. He’s on the phone, nodding vigorously in a deferential tone to the person on the other end. When he’s done, he starts to tell me about his path to becoming one of the few licensed drone operators in the country and the founder of his own farm service company.
I met him at Hotel Nikko in Guangzhou, for the XAG Drone Users Conference. XAG is an agricultural drone company, making drones that map fields and perfor
m precision pesticide spraying of crops. The company’s new headquarters is in a part of the city that is wildly empty, a new “high-tech industry area,” which so many cities across China are now building. The push in Guangzhou toward high-tech industries is an attempt to strengthen the Greater Bay Area of Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong into an economic powerhouse.
It’s advantageous for XAG to be out here. There are few buildings around—it’s mainly mountains and construction sites. XAG has ambitious plans for new precision agriculture plots and vegetable beds outside its headquarters, for testing out new features on its drones. Its biggest competitor is DJI, a “unicorn” company valued at US$15 billion, just two hours away in nearby Shenzhen.
The first thing I notice while talking to Wei is his optimism about the future. He’s from a small town in Anhui Province, and he exudes a contagious happiness about his present situation—a gratitude for all the luck that’s befallen him. I feel happy basking in this energy.
When American headlines talk of trade war and American decline due to China, maybe it’s this kind of energy that pundits are referring to. It’s a feeling that you have a right to the future, a right to imagination beyond the immediacy of the day—a feeling that may never have been in the United States to begin with but that, we are told by the media, is disappearing. I think back to one summer, driving across California through rural counties. Stopping at a Walmart, I watched a young woman with a blond ponytail explaining the features of a floor mop she was holding. “It can even go in the wash!” she chirped theatrically, peeling back the Velcro attachment. “Saves you time, and we all know there’s not enough time these days. I’m a public school teacher during the week, but I’m workin’ it, even though it’s a weekend.” Her cheerful tone reflected a mixture of pride and acceptance in having to work constantly just to scrape by.
Looking at Wei’s face and his relaxed smile, I see someone who strongly believes he has the right to a future, a future that is not steeped in precariousness, or in working weekends at a Walmart in rural Anhui. He’s enormously modest, but his life might be a parable about an emerging Chinese Dream wrought by rural education and community support. It also speaks to the stark line that emerges: between those who fund code, and those who write and use code.
Wei had a vocational high school education, never making it to college. Few of the kids he grew up with ever did. His dad worked for the state-owned railroad as a mechanic, and at some point, he was expected to take over his father’s post. This is fairly typical when someone in the family has a solid, working-class government job with good benefits—an “iron rice bowl.” There’re still a lot of jobs like this in China, considered to be good positions in the remnants of socialism. Stable hours, guaranteed retirement at age sixty, great health care, and a solid pension.
These jobs go hand in hand with the infrastructure and architecture that was built during high socialism, a passing reminder of the once grand ambitions of socialism to imagine a completely new society. Central heating is a good example, where each concrete residential building block in northern China had its heat turned on at the same time, controlled by a city furnace. An uncle of mine was a central heating technician for a long time, a job he inherited from my grandfather. My cousin, growing up under the promises of the free market, wanted something more glamorous. Instead of becoming a central heating technician, he opened his own car dealership, using money he borrowed from family members. He’s now a proud tuhao (nouveau riche, 土豪) who owns multiple Louis Vuitton bags purchased from his travels to Paris.
Wei was equally disinterested in his dad’s position, and his parents contemplated sending him into the military. But Wei had access to the internet. He discovered the world of model planes and helicopters, building his own from instructional videos online, and connecting with enthusiasts over chat. This eventually led him to discover XAG drones, and the XAG drone-pilot training program, run through WeChat.
There are about thirty thousand drone operators in China, and increasing demand for them. Before starting his own farm service company, Wei worked with a different group of farm service technicians in Anhui. Since the 1990s, small farm service teams have formed across rural China, as a response to the needs of a changing countryside. While farms stayed small, the loss of agricultural labor to urban areas meant a demand for help and labor on farms. Agricultural service teams started forming, both buying and making their own equipment that would work on these small-scale farms, helping farm owners harvest as well as spray pesticides and fertilizers throughout the year. These service teams are not just hired help, though—they are often at the front lines of developing new tools and new farm machinery, a goal that is part of the ambitious Made in China 2025 Plan to catalyze China into a knowledge- and service-based economy.
Wei says what distinguishes his farm service team from others is not just the use of drones, but the way drones attract a crew of motivated young people. The majority of these young people are from rural areas. They are excited about learning new digital skills rather than farming the way their parents did. During peak season, the farm service team members work long, tireless days. After the harvest, Wei takes some time off and works with XAG directly to train new drone operators and talk to potential drone buyers.
This year, Wei has driven more than thirty thousand kilometers in his SUV, working all across the country. Since the demand for drone operators is high, he helped spray crops everywhere from his home province of Anhui to the cotton fields of Xinjiang. He says he loves all the travel, and the unexpected situations that arise on the job—drone breakdowns with immediate fixes required in remote regions.
I imagine Wei’s story in California, the largest agriculture-producing state in the United States, with its markedly different system of industrial-farming infrastructure. And as someone wary of stories where tech seems to magically transform lives, I have my doubts about if, and how, this model of entrepreneurship might scale. Yet I can’t help but admit that his path is inspiring. To meet someone who grew up with the expectation that he would have to take over a stale job, but who now runs his own agricultural service team using drones, making more money than his parents, is the kind of dream story that would be advertised all over San Francisco as a billboard for the gig economy. I can imagine the ad on BART trains: No college education? No problem. Turn your passion for flying remote controlled airplanes into a career as a drone pilot. Be your own boss. Support local farmers. It’s a win-win.
I don’t know if Wei is truly his own boss, but I do know that he is now someone else’s boss, someone’s teacher and mentor. Unlike in the gig economy, his wages are not determined by an algorithm, nor did he swap a human boss for a computer one. He had, in the parlance of contemporary white-collar jobs, “opportunities for growth.” Rather than seeing him and others like him as mere drone operators or contractors, XAG takes the feedback of its drone pilots seriously, involving them in the process of updating drone hardware and features. He also wouldn’t be where he is now without the luxury that most Chinese parents traditionally offer their children: free room and board until they get married.
Most of all, it’s clear to me that Wei just loves drones, and he genuinely loves being part of XAG. While the gig economy workers I’ve talked to see themselves as free agents, temporarily making money under a company they typically were ambivalent about, Wei was excited by XAG. One of his hobbies is photography, and he’s developed a reputation with XAG marketing as a top-notch drone photographer. He shows me images of beautiful rice paddies and swaths of wheat. He often sends the marketing department his favorite photos just for fun.
Wei’s not alone at this conference. About half the attendees are drone operators from farm service companies, from all areas of China. The drone operators are distinct in a sea of people, darkened from the sun, greeting each other in a twangy rural dialect that veers off the accepted national standards of Mandarin pronunciation.
One farm service company owner tells me that while
many farmers were at first suspicious of drones, they eventually realized how cost-effective drones are. Since the drones are more precise in their application of pesticides and fertilizers, farmers could save money on material costs. “Farmers think it’s really fashionable to use drones now, and they will tell their neighbors all about it,” the farm service company owner says. As of 2018, 5 percent of farming in China was done using precision agriculture. XAG drones are typically used by farms around three hectares in size, because of hardware constraints. Since 98 percent of farm households own small pieces of land less than two hectares, there remains ample room for market growth. With this potential boom and the scalability of Wei’s drone-pilot training, I wonder how long the field will continue to grow before there is an oversaturation of drone operators.
2.
The drone user conference is a cross section of Chinese technology and the dynamics of contemporary life in China. Investors and venture capitalists sit at the very front, their neatly pressed clothing and stylish haircuts alluding to wealthy ease. Thin, fit thought leaders in T-shirts are behind them, along with some of the guest speakers at the conference—business development execs from Ant Financial and Alibaba, Bayer Crop Science and academics. They have undergone schooling at top universities such as Tsinghua and Peking University, or have degrees from places abroad like Australia, England, and the United States. Behind the thought leaders and guests are one or two engineers who work at XAG and, of course, the press. Two young women from CCTV Channel 7, the national military and agricultural channel, sit looking despondently bored, trying to stay awake. One of them starts to nod off in the afternoon.
A wide aisle separates the farm service company owners and drone operators, who sit in the back. That’s where Sun Wei is, along with Lei Bing, who I also met earlier—he’s a taciturn drone operator who is my age but looks ten years older, renowned in the community for his fierce piloting on steep terrain. It’s rowdy in the back of the auditorium. During the new-feature unveiling for the latest drone model by XAG’s CTO, there’s a nonstop buzz of voices. When the automatically refillable tank for pesticides is announced, the front of the auditorium politely claps while the crowd in the back stands up, fists pumping, “Finally! Finally you heard us!” The CTO points to increased sensors on the drone, and the drone operators cheer and clap loudly like sports spectators. New modular components that click together are announced, meaning no more fumbling with tiny screws in the middle of a field, and the operators lose it, hooting and hollering so loudly that it puts smirks on the faces of the well-heeled crowd up front.
