Labor, AI, and the Humans of Circles USA, Pt. 1: Some History
By Amy Brooks
Circles USA Content Writer & Editor
Disclaimer: This column reflects the values and opinions of one independent worker, and does not necessarily reflect the policies of Circles USA as an organization. We remain committed to platforming a variety of viewpoints on the technology, culture, and other issues that affect the lives of CUSA members everywhere. We invite you to share your opinion on AI and labor with us at circles@circlesusa.org.
Like many human beings in our Circles USA community, I'm celebrating Labor Day 2026 by working.
This letter to you began as hand-written notes, jotted while I sipped coffee and watched the sun rise from my porch. Words are my work. Writing is my craft and trade. I use language to work my way out of poverty; but I also play with words to inform, to persuade, to challenge, and to entertain. Mostly I write to tell stories about our shared humanity.
Writing transformed my life as a child. As an adult, writing helps me tell the stories of other lives transformed by Circles chapters nationwide.
This week is Labor Week, kicked off by Labor Day: a holiday dedicated to American workers. To ordinary people like you and me who spend our lives in service or under contract to corporations; to clients; to other professionals in our communities; and to a government which seems less accountable, generation after generation, to the people—citizens and non-citizens—who fuel US wealth with our hard-earned tax dollars.
So this Labor Week, I’m working. I am also worrying about the future. I worry about the rise of technologies that threaten my livelihood and passion. Will AI be doing my job by fall of 2027? Am I one of the 15 million US workers these talking toasters may soon replace?
When I work, I shape and consume one word, article, book, interview transcript at a time...not whole archives. Rather than a CPU or optimized search engine, I use human language, questions, to process and investigate.
And the questions I want to investigate this Labor Week, to ask you—my fellow laborers of Circles USA—are: How will AI transform our lives and communities? Are workers really better off for the AI boom? Do families striving to escape poverty stand to win economically by embracing AI? And is it in our best interests to let them multiply this tech by building data centers where we live?
If we believe what our elected officials, tech executives, and media are telling us, AI supremacy is inevitable. After all, several secretive, powerful men with federal appointments and vested financial stakes in unchecked AI growth tell us so. Daily. Sometimes hourly. AI is An Invaluable Tool; AI is The Future of Our Workforce. A friend sent me this soundbite from POTUS: “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign...”
Trump could be right. Still, when I read that quote, I said to myself, Right, buddy. Where have I heard that one before.
I was born and raised in West Virginia, a state whose coal miners Trump once held up as an example of “backwards and poor” culture, people who lacked “it”: by his definition, “an ability to become an entrepreneur.” Yet Appalachian families are no strangers to tech corporations’ promises of entrepreneurial success and plentiful jobs. King Coal dropped uninvited into our region some 150 years ago, its CEOs securing their own generational wealth by bleeding dry West Virginia’s natural resources. Coal companies lifted a handful of bosses and foremen into mansions on mountaintops. Below, in the valleys and hollers, thousands of working poor survived as little more than indentured servants in mineral extraction colonies (or “company towns”) policed by hired gun thugs.
Workers in company towns soon learned that they had little agency, collective bargaining power, or recourse against unfair labor practices—only company scrip, a form of currency spendable on all essentials at their camp’s company store. Then, as now, most workers saw little of the wealth their labor created.
“You want to be treated like men? You want to be treated fair?” Union organizer Joe Kenehan thunders in John Sayles’s thrilling 1987 drama Matewan, which dramatizes the (multicultural, immigrant-powered) 1920 uprising against mine labor abuses in Matewan, WV. “Well, you ain't men to that coal company. You're equipment, like a shovel, a gondola car, or a hunk of wood brace. They'll use you till you wear out or you break down, or you're buried under a slate fall, and then they'll get a new one. And they don't care what color it is or where it comes from. It doesn't matter how much coal you can load or how long your family has lived on this land. If you stand alone, you're just so much shit to those people.”
Kenehan’s warning of betrayed futures for miners and their families proved prophetic. Today, federal cash infusions artificially sustain a dying fossil fuel industry without materially helping its dying workers. The Columbia Political Review found in 2025 that “[i]n West Virginia, there is a correlation between high concentrations of county mining employment and county impoverishment. This prolonged underinvestment in education,” they claim,
has resulted in a workforce that is inept to work outside the mines or blue-collar industry, as three-quarters or 74.9 percent of those employed in the mining industry have only a high school degree or less. Similar to industrial era ‘coal camp schools,’ where education was intentionally limited and focused on mining, underfunded schools in West Virginia today keep students tied to the coal industry by providing an education ranked 46th in the nation, leaving many youth unable to achieve higher-paying jobs. [Source]
I came of age amid the devastation of unregulated industrial expansion. In central Appalachia, many towns’ water supplies are terminally poisoned by acid mine runoff. Billion-year-old mountaintops have been dynamited across many vistas: ugly strip mine scars on Eastern Cherokee and Osage landscapes which still cradle rich, wildly diverse cultures. If capitalism has deserted us, our shared heritage as mountain people has not.
11 generations of my Brooks family tended that land. Rather than take up the lantern and the pick, though, they built for their children a heritage of homesteading, subsistence farming, study of the natural sciences, and the Presbyterian clergy. Defying industrial expansion and big fossil fuel’s siren song of cash booms, they fed themselves and their neighbors throughout the Depression with modest crops; helped found the WV State Park Service, the Brooks Bird Club, and a thriving 4-H network; and became some of Appalachia’s foremost authorities on the mountains’ ecology, botany, geology, flora and fauna.
My grandfather Maurice—a writer of clear, elegant prose that anyone could understand and enjoy—published his nature guide The Appalachians at age 65. That book has survived multiple reprints and is counted among the great studies of our home mountain range. No doubt “backwards and poor” by Silicon Valley standards, Grandpa Maurice was, like his only granddaughter, a lifelong renter who could never afford to buy a house. He would never donate a million dollar endowment. But the building where I studied biology on the West Virginia University campus is still, to this day, named Brooks Hall. And the photos of my ancestors hanging inside it remind me how durable human intelligence, especially in service to nature and community, can be.
Maybe your home has a story like West Virginia’s. And maybe your family story, like mine, draws a direct line of accountability from workers facing poverty to today’s AI, utility, coal and fracked gas profiteers.
Are they offering your people, like mine, jobs and schools and money if only you’ll consent to be a company town—this time, to fuel the data centers needed to sustain their AI? Do you believe their promises? Have they created clear, collaborative channels for feedback from the residents who will be most affected? How do we balance economic progress with plain good sense, providing for our kids’ futures here on earth?
As I’ve written so often over my years with CUSA, Circles USA has spent 25+ years building community to end poverty—one human conversation at a time. Our chapters and leadership are made up of real live humans of every age, cultural background, ability level, political and vocational stripe. This Labor Week, I hope you’ll take a few moments to consider these questions about artificial intelligence and your town’s working relationship to it, too. Then, please tell us what you think about AI: in your own words, in your own time, and in your own vibrant, imperfect, honest, one-of-a-kind human voice.
Building Community to End Poverty for 25+ Years
