Will Back Door AI Take Your Job Away?

Will Back Door AI Take Your Job Away?

Or Has It Already?

I am about to have a full hip replacement, and a robot will do most of the work. Under the eyes of a trusted surgeon, a surgery that used to take hours and involve serious human strength and agility, is reduced to less than an hour and a half and promises bone cuts with a precision of less than a thousandth of an inch. Wow. Knee is next! Amazing, since such surgery once required years of medical training practice, relied on the precision of a master sculptor and the strength of ditch digger. Right now, there is a surgeon watching every second of the operation. Eventually, that just might be a step away from dispensing with human supervision unless the robot asks for it.

Talk about creeping socialism. What happens when most “high skill” jobs join automobile assembly line robots and are performed through computer-controlled machines? Manufacturing high quality goods for a population that cannot afford to buy them sounds like road paved with disaster. If skilled, educated and experienced labor no longer commands solid level of compensation, what does? Ownership, I guess. Of land and the assets that manufacture, harvest and extract.

Those “assets” used to include machinery and labor, but since labor is being reduced in the value-added chain, that pretty much relegates the economy to those who own or control what matters. The land from which raw materials are grown or extracted and the machines, including interconnecting transportation, that make and move the resulting products. However, if ownership is the future determinant of more than bare-level pay, our present augurs for a very unfortunate future. If today, 1% of Americans own more than half the wealth/assets in the country, and if the post-pandemic pattern of increase that statistic (2/3s of post-pandemic asset growth has gone to that 1%) are any indication, how do we make “a living”? Big Brother provides? We return to feudalism? Who designs the next level of AI machines? AI machines?

The timeline is anything but set, and the anger of those saddled with the burdens of that change can easily alter that. Look at the global rise of populism, the MAGA movement here, for what it looks like in its earliest phases. Look at the decisions of our very conservative US Supreme Court. In times of economic stability, historically the Court favors liberal views. When the going gets tough or unsure, it prioritizes property rights (ownership!). Looking at nothing more than the Court’s reining in the Environmental Protection Agency to provide more freedom of property owners to avoid regulation and how conservative voting restrictions elude judicial restrictions … and you can see a property rights tsunami of power rewrite American priorities.

LA Times contributor Brian Merchant (May 25th) took a brief look at how AI was shifting demand away from innovative and creative workers. Illustrators used to provide all sorts of diagrams, drawings, depictions and artist adds to everything from corporate presentations to renderings present in newspapers and online periodicals. Some, but fewer, still do. But where that expense can be avoided: “[Maddening] still, few are likely to agree on what constitutes technological replacement, and what does not.

“Case in point: Since the text generators burst onto the scene late last year, a number of digital media companies have been experimenting with AI-generated content. CNET quietly started publishing AI-written stories in November, and BuzzFeed and Insider have announced that they’re trying out different forms of AI-generated content too.

“At the same time, all three companies have also been experimenting with laying off their staff. CNET fired 10% of its newsroom in March, and Insider followed suit in April. BuzzFeed shut down its entire Pulitzer Prize-winning News division, which was home to about 60 journalists, and laid off 15% of employees companywide.

“Now, digital media is a particularly punishing business — another former heavyweight, Vice, declared bankruptcy just last week [mid-May] — and one that’s no stranger to layoffs at any given time. Yet the timing struck many as alarming, especially at a moment when executives in other industries are explicitly stating their intent to use AI to take over jobs previously done by humans; IBM Chief Executive Arvind Krishna, for instance, estimated AI would replace about 8,000 of the firm’s jobs in coming years.

“Not two weeks after the News division was shut down, BuzzFeed held its annual Investor Day, at which CEO Jonah Peretti spoke about, among other things, the ways his company was embracing AI. ‘BuzzFeed has always lived at the intersection of technology and creativity, he said at the event. ‘And recent developments in artificial intelligence represent an opportunity to take this convergence to the next level.’… AI, he said, was making brand-new kinds of content possible and would soon replace the ‘static’ content we’ve grown accustomed to reading on websites with ‘new formats that are more gamified, more personalized and more interactive.”’

Writers in Hollywood are on strike, and one of their major issues is the use of AI in writing scripts. Lawyers increasingly rely on AI legal research, and with a little bit of tweaking, to write the corresponding brief that relies on that research. Financial analysis can be done in real time with decreasing dependence on human beings adding nuanced adds and adjustments.

The roiling rebellion in the ranks of increasingly disenfranchised unskilled White workers shows a traditional effort at blame (liberals, minorities and immigrants) and a wholesale rejection of scientists, doctors and other educated “elites” who are the “enablers and fomenters” of that disenfranchisement. Luddites with smartphones and computers?! Progress or damnable social conspiracy. And all this as the First Amendment battles even the most toxic aspects of social media. The Second Amendment battles the rather unbridled use of military assault weapons in the hands of civilians. There still really are no effective regulations or even accepted guidelines for the use of AI. That last campaign snippet you saw on TV or online, are you sure that person you think made that statement was in fact the person who did?

I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s not as if a nasty elephant just crashed into a small building… it was an entire herd feeding on each other’s anger.