I don’t have to link to a bunch of academic studies, reports, old newspapers, or any kind of hot take story to claim the following are all 100% true:
- Email replaced letter writing and now we all send way more correspondence
- Text messaging provided a discreet way to have more conversations, less of which was over the phone
- Computers dramatically reduced the overhead in filing and sorting reports, data, etc., and now we all just create tons more of it individually
- The proliferation of cameras means more video and photos are recorded than ever before
Duh.
It’s the trend that makes me think AI is going to be like email, computers, and a zillion other technological innovations.
”Oh, you have email now! We can speed up replies and messages like never before!”
“Oh, you have a laptop now. You can work from home!”
”Oh, you have a smart phone now. You can work from everywhere all the time!”
The same trend works in less-“tech” industries, too.
“Oh, my car replaced my horse. I can go further now.”
Cars are more fuel efficient, so people just drive more now, too. The result is suburbs and the heat death of the universe. Cool.
Food is cheaper than ever thanks to industrial output, so people eat more (and generally less healthy) now.
I suspect AI is going to be the same way.
”Oh, you have AI now. We can generate tons more stuff!”
Where before you could work on a grant proposal, a report, a whatever, in a week, now you’ll be expected to do five, ten, or more. Where before you could spin up some idea remixing this or that, now you’ll be expected to do half a dozen ideas.
I started thinking about this when that “me, but as an action hero toy pack” meme started fluttering around. That is an example where that never would have existed. No designer lost their job because of that. Those silly things simply just would not have existed before (unrelated, we really need to talk about how many of you appear to be defined by wine and food. Seriously?). People simply would have done something else, just as they did before the invention of Netflix or video games. “I dunno, something else” is probably the answer to a lot of “What did/will/are we going to do?”
There will surely be job changes and losses. But this is where I think I’m even more accurate in this prediction.
As I’ve told my students, AI has a way of “clearing the decks” of a certain kind of huckster and low-level creator. Where before it was profitable to spend time doing “administrative” tasks, now it’s not because the bottom has fallen out and everyone knows “AI can probably do that in seconds.” I tell my students constantly, “You now have to think harder because I can pay you $50k a year or the machine $20.” This is, so far, lost on them because undergraduates are mostly terrible at doing what is best for them at the time. Whatever’s “fast, easy, cheap” is where they go.
But I already find myself thinking, “Okay, client wants to get people to sign up for this event. I’ve gotta do something more/better/more interesting than just a standard ol’ sharer image and a PDF or whatever.”
The result is now I just feel like I have to work even harder, spending more time thinking up more ideas, doing more revisions, more research, more coding, more of everything.
It is the “things got easier so now we expect you to do more of that” all over again.
And that’s not great!
I don’t think anyone looks at their email and says, “Gosh, this is so much better than writing letters.” With rare exceptions in history, most people could actually finish their correspondence in a day. No one finishes their email because as soon as you send one that person wants to finish theirs and we’re all stuck in a mortal game of email hot potato.
AI is going to likely require more people just churn more, produce more, and generally just perform more.
I know it’s en vogue to say this is “late stage capitalism”, and I ordinarily shrug at this recognizing that capitalism has generally produced higher quality of living for more people than any government ever has. But for once, this is also apt: the whole foundation of capitalism is “the pie gets bigger.” Some people get larger slices than others, but the gist is the pie isn’t fixed. One of the ways this works is productivity and efficiency, usually in the form of technology, enable this. It’s just that some of those enablements also mean grinding people’s mental faculties in a way we’ve not seen since men had to plow fields with their bare hands.
If anything, I suspect AI will generally result in more people having more stress. More people will have more time devoted to work, either by fiat, executive “leadership”, or the robotic sword of Damocles swinging over their employment.
The only viable solution I see to this is to put hard caps on this through government intervention. And I am enough of an originalist, pessimist, and realist to know that’s not going to happen in the United States anytime soon, maybe ever. I bet we’re generations away from such protections like, “Maybe ya’ll should stop working after 7pm.”
Thomas Jefferson thought it’d be pretty great if everyone owned their own little parcel of land. You could use that land to carve out your own livelihood by tending to it, owning it, and using it to feed yourself and your family. His detractors (mostly in the Hamilton-Adams camps) thought this ridiculous and wanted to see more people live in cities. I’m beginning to understand the Jeffersonians might have been on to something about the whole “pursuit of happiness” thing. If they could see us now.
