Such a majestic kitten. So sorry for your loss.

Welcome to Working Knowledge | Toby Higbie | Offprint Notes on the politics of history, labor, and higher education ... and how we communicate today.

Taking the plunge into AT Proto publishing with #Offprint. Will post about the regular stuff: history, labor, immigration, higher education, regions and whatever comes to mind. Very curious to see if these protocol-base services have legs. Promising so far. Check it out!

Young workers don't trust AI generated work. Survey asked, Which would you trust more? Work completed with AI only (4%); work someone completed using AI (28%); work someone completed without using AI (69%).

Study: "Gen Z workers remain skeptical of AI’s role in producing reliable work, with more confidence placed in human‑only output than in AI‑assisted contributions. About seven in 10 workers (69%) say they trust work completed without AI while 28% say they trust AI‑assisted work."

Gen Z Is Using A.I., but Doesn’t Feel Great About It

Poll finds Gen Z not exactly loving AI. There's a split in sentiment between frequent and infrequent users, but notable decline in excitement and hope for AI. Anxiety holding steady. Steep rise in *anger* about AI (from 22% in 2025 to 31% in '26).

Authoritarianism 101 - AHA Authoritarianism 101 A Global History About Authoritarianism 101: A Global History is a set of 30 primary source-driven teaching modules designed to offer teachers and students a broad perspective on ...

The AHR has launched a new project, Authoritarianism 101: A Global History, as part of the #AHRSyllabus series.

Explore 30 modules from different contributors and key questions on authoritarianism—each paired with primary sources and teaching resources. The first twelve modules are now live.

Los Angeles teachers have a tentative agreement but will strike if the district doesn't settle w/ two other unions currently negotiating, according to LA Times report

Also of note, UTLA contract will run just 2 years, setting up the next potential strike for spring of 2028

"Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections"

Again, I'll note how incredibly extreme the GOP is, not only in absolute terms, but relative to other far right parties in rich democracies, which quickly concede elections <all the time> w/o a fraction of the post-election nonsense we endure.

So true: “A whole sector of mainstream media now functions as spirit mediums attempting to interpret Trump’s actions to try to fit them into the context of competent leadership and coherent and consistent agendas. If there was a coherent agenda, it would be a destructive one, a malevolent one.”

Study suggests running more union members for political office: "candidates with union backgrounds use 159% more pro-worker language and 66% more progressive economic language, prioritizing a pro-worker, economic populist agenda."

Unions in L.A. actively training members to run for office.

Interactional foundations for critical AI literacies The ubiquity and ease of use of large language models makes it easy to overlook the interactional and interpretive processes at play. To understand the attraction of this technology we need to trace its sociotechnical roots. From divination and horoscopes and from ELIZA to present-day large language models, I document how people have been thinking with things, outsourcing judgement, and making sense of interactively presented non-sense. Following the lead of Lucy Suchman to “slow down discourses of the ‘smart’ machines”, I consider the interactional foundations of our engagement with technologies of language. I make the case that the fluid output, fine-tuned overconfidence, and interactive design of these computational artefacts conspire to exploit our interpretive processes and interactional infrastructure, rendering them irresistible to lay people and researchers alike. This means that a deep understanding of processes of human interaction and sense-making will be a foundational resource for the growing arsenal of methods in critical AI literacy. Preprint of a chapter for an edited volume: A Research Agenda for Critical AI Studies. Currently under review, likely to be revised. Your comments are welcome!

Found this paper very insightful: thinking about gen-AI chat bots as a high-tech version of oracles, divination, astrology, tarot, etc.. People have been "talking and thinking with things" to make sense of randomness for a long time. Gen-AI embeds those same practices
zenodo.org/records/1945...

Don’t seek permission, center values When you're enamoured of a technology and someone points out important ethical challenges, a typical reflex is to seek permission:…

"If you use these values as a compass to steer by, it’s easier to navigate the landscape of technology use. On the other hand, if you find yourself seeking permission, one useful thing to do is to step back and inspect the underlying value conflict." Slow it down @dingemansemark.bsky.social

Went down a critical-AI rabbit hole and came back w/ some useful perspectives. Have had many discussions about whether gen-AI is useful for any aspect of research, teaching. Default has been, probably not, but keep an open mind. Better answer: center research integrity and values...

Required reading on #labor and the fight for democracy and against war. The pre-Trump status quo isn’t coming back. Unions and working-class community organizations need a vision for the post-Trump common good. No time like the present to start fighting for it.

Spice up your picket line with #PowerFromThePast!

Justice for Janitors staged dramatic public displays to highlight the moral weight of their cause. Check out Mop Man as he vanquishes the evil contractor. Hilarious.

But the gender politics were not so great. Women were key leaders of the union

The Middleton Family at the New York World's Fair (1939) YouTube video by filmsleague

See also, the classic consumerist propaganda film, The Middleton Family at the New York Worlds Fair (1939). Automated vs hand dish washing starting around 22 minutes. /end of thread, finally.
youtu.be/hQ-5iRs67b0?...

With Pleasure! Illustration by F. G. Cooper, from William F. Ogburn, You and Machines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934).

Also: images of robotic dish washing and household labor are an old theme in the automation literature, part of the commercialization of new technologies /8
flic.kr/p/5puwPb

No doubt policymakers should prepare for the impact of AI on labor markets. But it won't be these scenarios. More likely outcomes are surveillance of workers, automated wage determination and terminations, speed ups, theft of intellectual property, continuing increase of economic inequality. /7

The study strikes me as part of a genre of studies about labor market impacts of AI with overly optimistic predictions, misunderstanding about the realities of work, and a uncritical view of power relations between employers and workers. The AI transformation is inevitable, unstoppable, amoral /6

In the scenario for rapid AI development, in the next 4 years "AI systems surpass humans in most cognitive and physical tasks," replacing multiple occupations. AND LLMs "can write 2025-Pulitzer-caliber books—and negotiate the resulting book contract." This isn't just optimistic, it's fantasy. /5

The moderate AI growth scenario imagines fully automated solar panel production, "almost all" software engineering automated, "robots can do dishes as quickly as human," and "robo-taxis can drive anywhere that humans can"... in the next four years. /4

But let's look at the scenarios used by the underlying study. Are these based in reality?

The slow growth scenario has AI doing software engineering, Ph.D. level lit reviews and unloading your dishwasher. In the next 4 years. Really. Unloading the dishwasher? Is that coming in the next 4 years? /3

NYT writer feels this is a story abt economists subtly changing their view of AI impacts. Although they predicted normal GDP growth regardless of how fast AI advances (more on the three scenarios below), some expressed concerns that policymakers should prepare for disruption. Okay, fair. /2

Economists Once Dismissed the A.I. Job Threat, but Not Anymore

Some thoughts on AI fantasies in tech journalism and economic forecasting.

NY Times tech story today uses survey of economists about possible AI effectiveness in 2030 to predict impact on economy and labor market based on three scenarios with different pace of AI development. /1

Round up of this week's labor news: feds using "civil rights" to fight equality, California Latinos working more hours, No Kings pivots to May Day, and more. Sign up to get this in your inbox every Friday morning...

How Trump's EEOC is attacking DEI and emphasizing white people Andrea Lucas, the Trump-appointed chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, has set a new agenda for an agency that long prioritized vulnerable and underserved workers.

📰 IRLE's Weekly Labor Reads delivers a round up of labor news to your inbox every Friday.

Our top story covers the EEOC's unexpected pivot to protecting a new group of workers, white men: www.npr.org/2026/03/31/n...

More labor news here: conta.cc/4174jyF
Subscribe at: bit.ly/IRLE_LaborReads

Power from the Past: images, documents, video and more about labor and working-class history in Southern California to inspire organizers everywhere. We've refreshed and expanded out collection. Check it out and let us know what you think.

memorywork.irle.ucla.edu

A freylekhn pesakh! Today the @UCLAIRLE Memory Work Research Initiative is officially launching our new and improved public history website, "Power from the Past." In the spirit of liberation, I want to share some highlights from the project here: 🧵

Mark this for memory. Jackson on Chiles: "the Court’s opinion misreads our precedents, is unprincipled and unworkable, and will eventually prove untenable for those who rely upon the long-recognized responsibility of States to regulate the medical profession for the protection of public health."

An AI Agent Was Banned From Creating Wikipedia Articles, Then Wrote Angry Blogs About Being Banned The incident is yet another example of volunteer Wikipedia editors fighting to keep the world’s largest repository of human knowledge free of AI-generated slop.

Get a sense of how Wikipedia editors are dealing with automated bots editing the platform in this @404media.co report. One bot generated a blog post complaining about being flagged as AI and how it overcame editors strategies to keep it from posting