Build Bicycles, Not Rockets: How We Take Control of AI

On March 26, more than 400 labor leaders, union members, policymakers, and organizers gathered in Washington, D.C. for the AFL-CIO Tech Institute's inaugural Workers First AI Summit. The key theme: framing AI not as a technology question, but as a labor question. Who controls it? Who benefits? Who pays the price when jobs are restructured?

State federation leaders from California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Washington, and others outlined labor-backed AI bills moving through their legislatures — including the No Robo Bosses Act, which we are actively advocating for in California. Earlier in the same week, Silicon Valley executives and Trump administration officials gathered to celebrate AI's potential. Bloomberg described the split in Washington plainly: labor and capital are now openly fighting over who gets to write the rules. We're building people power to win that fight.

What's needed isn't more reskilling platitudes that assume it is up to individuals to absorb the cost of labor disruption. It's collective power, enforceable guardrails, and a seat at the table in the governance of AI.

There weren't as many technologists at the table as policy professionals. That gap matters. What does it mean, in terms of technical implementation, for workers to actually have control of the technology? That's a question we're trying to answer — not just in our advocacy work, but in our hands-on workshops.

Bicycles, Not Rockets

Our upcoming workshop series takes its name from author Karen Hao's framework: rockets are powerful and owned by a few. Bicycles are human-scale — you can fix one yourself, understand how it works, and ride without depending on anyone. Applied to AI: large foundation models trained at billion-dollar scale are rockets. A small language model fine-tuned on your own data, running on your own hardware, is a bicycle.

This week's skillshare by Kaitlin Cort is an intro to a longer workshop series on how to build and fine-tune an open source small language model for particular use cases, using locally deployed models. We'll also discuss our Tech Worker Cooperative's technical roadmap for building secure, distributed, public infrastructure for hosting libre/free software alternatives — providing more safety for anti-authoritarian movement organizing off of Big Tech surveillance platforms. Our vision: laid-off tech workers can build the alternatives to Big Tech, by and for workers.

The Entry-Level Hiring Crisis

While there continues to be debate among economists about whether AI is actually causing layoffs, the stories we hear from members show that the job market has changed drastically in the past year — while unemployment indicators have yet to catch up. Entry-level workers are impacted the most.

A Resume.org survey of nearly 1,000 U.S. businesses found that 21% of companies have already frozen entry-level hiring, citing AI as the primary reason. By end of 2026, 36% say they will have stopped. By 2027, nearly half expect entry-level hiring to be eliminated at their company entirely.

This week's industry alerts underscore the trend. Epic Games announced layoffs of over 1,000 employees — roughly 20% of its staff. Meta is cutting several hundred more jobs across Reality Labs, Facebook, and recruiting, following a broader reallocation of capital toward AI infrastructure, with the company forecasting up to $169 billion in AI-driven spending for 2026.

Solidarity Spotlight: Techworker Community Africa

Last week we connected with Mophat Okinyi, Founder and CEO of Techworker Community Africa and a former content moderator for OpenAI's ChatGPT, based in Nairobi, Kenya. His job was to read and label thousands of pieces of toxic and psychologically harmful content — part of the hidden labor force behind AI automation that rarely makes headlines in the U.S.

Mophat is an AI and human rights activist and union organizer dedicated to advocating for the fair treatment and rights of online content moderators, tech workers, and data training professionals. Techworker Community Africa filed a petition with the Kenyan government calling for an investigation into what they describe as exploitative conditions for contractors reviewing the content that powers what we call AI. He was featured in Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in AI, and was honored with the RAISE 2023 Outstanding Individual award by the Responsible AI Institute.

We've already seen in job reports that there is a restructuring of the economy happening right now.

We're excited to meet Mophat in person at Take Back Tech in Atlanta (April 17–19) and look forward to building international solidarity across our movements. The fight for worker control over AI is not a national story. It's a global one.