I saw a FB meme today to the effect that "I don't want AI to do my art and writing for me so that I can do laundry and dishes; I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I have more time to do art and writing." I am not forwarding the actual meme for a couple of reasons, but mostly because they will certainly believe that I agree with the sentiment, and I don't want to encourage that.
The fear does arise that DALL-E is going to put real artists out of business, and Chat-GPT bids fair to do the same for writers. I have some sympathy, as Google put me out of business overnight decades ago. There is a theory that we are not so much self-interested but tribally-interested in our political and cultural sympathies. We want presidents who look like they are going to help Our People get more and better jobs. When I wrote much over a decade ago about the Arts & Humanities and other American tribes I took note of this. We frame things in terms that we regard as clearly practical and better-for-the-country or even moral and better-for-the-whole-culture, but often it is really just jobs for the children of our friends, were we to be stern with ourselves. The other American tribes do the same thing, BTW. It just didn't come up here.
So the statement, though many of us here will feel some sympathy for it, is almost completely backwards. First, we already live in that world where a technology now does our dishes and laundry for us.
What we did in response to this is develop a culture in which we had more that two sets of clothes and had kitchensful of new appliances and varieties of dishes and tableware that used to be the province of only the rich. More rooms. Foods, and new ones, year-round. Landscaping, entertainment tech, communications of all sorts. When it got easier we just increased our desire for it and rapidly took it for granted. When technology graduated into doing more housework, we just went 10x on the amount of housework needed.
We are already in the world where you get to do lots of art and writing, Jasper (and I know that the poster is retired or near-retired, BTW. Tell your great-grandfather about retirement.)
Next, I think dishes and laundry are nearly always necessary and thus a bit noble. Noble activities have the potential for being ennobling. Maybe not always fun. Much as I like writing and music, I don't have complete confidence those have been ennobling for me. In fact, they may be a net loss in terms of my character. If so for me, likely for all the people who checked like or love on the post also.
It sounds a bit snobbish, actually, because if you take this idea of what you want AI to do seriously, you will automatically, without noticing it, regard your hobby scribbling as more elevated than the actual livelihoods of millions of people in the world. "We didn't want to become obsolete ourselves. But we are okay with other people becoming obsolete, so long as they are working at low-status jobs already."
The more I look at this, the uglier it gets. I'm done now.
3 comments:
I think we're unlikely to get Rosie from The Jetsons. We're going to get a bunch of new slightly more intelligent appliances, if anything (Though a microwave that could actually figure out how to gently heat food to a particular temperature would be nice). I would bet assembly line labor is going to become a thing of the past within two decades. I'm fairly sure this is where AI is going to make inroads after it starts handling call-center and paper-routing jobs. We were already pretty far down the path of automating those jobs thirty years ago. One of my system engineer jobs in the 1990s was on an automated work routing system that virtually transferred documents (actually links to scanned images of paper forms) among processors. The productivity boost was such that there would be no way to scale a work force sufficient to handle the volume processed with the system in place. Now add AI that can actually read and understand the forms, or a phone call, or an email, and make the updates in the system of record itself. Most anybody who works 9-5 in an office responding to emails and pushing paper is looking at obsolescence.
The jobs it will be hard to automate are the ones that require skilled hands-on labor, even in a blue collar environment. Even in those cases the day is coming, depending on how standardized the operations can be made. There are some amazing machines doing railroad trackwork, for instance, but they benefit from the very rigid standardization and predictability of most track structures.
I'd guess that AI won't do repairs well. Some kinds of diagnosis, yes. Fixing it, no, unless you're talking about module swaps. There are lots of places for a pipe to break; how do you weld them all?
Christoper B..."I would bet assembly line labor is going to become a thing of the past within two decades." Peter Drucker remarked that the assembly line is not the perfect engineering of human labor, it is the imperfect engineering of machine labor...and that was 50+ years ago.
OTOH...while it's not exactly assembly line work, garment manufacturing...the cut-and-sew process.....has proven remarkably resistant to automation. There's a startup in Atlanta, Softwear Automation, working on automating the process. I wrote about them in 2019:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/59010.html
Pretty impressive, but from there website it looks like they're still focused on t-shirts.
Post a Comment