Last week, I talked about science fiction’s most famous AIs and how they compare to the current chatbot invasion.
They’re going to affect far more than science fiction.
THE MAGIC OF WORLD BUILDING
When authors build a new world, they change one variable and see how it plays out in everything from religion to politics to ecology. It’s my favorite part of writing.
It’s been kind of amazing to see that play out in real-time with these language-learning models (that aren’t really AI at all…)
HOW AI CHANGES THE WORLD?
LAW
We have legal fights about who owns it, the words it produces, and what they’re allowed to train them on. It’s going to be a big mess until we all understand what we’re looking at and how we can adapt copyright laws written when people were still physically moving little metal letters around and the new American congress was restricting books and maps to the author for 14 years. The United States was all of three years old.
ECONOMICS
We have another step in the “machines are coming for our jobs” fight that has been going on in various industries for a long while. Factories, the service industry, accountants, travel agents, and human resources all get offloaded to the machines.
I used to work at a grocery store where we switched ordering products to an algorithm, leaving “buyers” with much less to do. Though not nothing. I still laugh when I remember the desperate email we received one April telling us to ignore the algorithm’s instructions and stop buying broth because “it doesn’t know the weather and hasn’t realized its spring.” A blindingly simple adjustment a human can make.
Our world requires a truly awe-inspiring amount of words, from the tiny slogan on the sparkling water you’ll have for lunch to the fine print on an airline ticket, to the ads on TV, to the articles you’ve googled. It takes a lot of people a lot of time to create all that. A lot more people are about to find themselves on the precarious edge where a robot is doing their job and they’re now running the robot.
MILITARY
We have the military installing it into fighter jets and vehicles, escalating ethical questions around drone warfare and sovereign borders if the person who’s invading you isn’t even in the jet, and what a war would even mean if there aren’t any people involved.
ART
We have the con artists come out of the woodwork to steal wholesale as much intellectual property as possible, flooding markets with semi-plagiarized dreck. It’s not actually that easy to sell books, so this is not the shortcut they think it is by any stretch of the imagination. But humans have published an avalanche of terrible books, so again, nothing really changes? Like most of these, it makes existing trends go faster.
Can artists opt out of training the programs copying them and replacing them for a fraction of the cost? Can they actually be compensated for the labor they did and not just the guy who owns the chatbot? We shall see.
RELIGION
We already have people quoting the “profound” things CHATGPT has come up with. People are already speculating about the ghost in the machine. What is actually happening is that it has scraped all the profound things humans have said on the internet and is feeding it back to us one word at a time without understanding anything. But if it is terrible of making meaning, humans are profoundly good at it, even where none exists
RELATIONSHIPS
I’m not even going to get into the people who have already “fallen in love” with it. This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with how humans move through the world bonding with nearly anything that displays the slightest human trait and assigning meaning to every breath. Click here for a dismayed building!
Can you see it? A glimpse of the huge shift to the gig economy, leisure connected even further to our anthropomorphized computers, fighting strange wars where there are no human casualties? Cults springing up around the nonsense of AI? Not THAT different than the world we inhabit now. Just a bit…extra.
HOW DOES THE WORLD WE LIVE IN CHANGE AI?
Building a world is not just about how a new innovation changes everything. It’s about how the world we have changes the innovation.
ECONOMY
We live in a highly monopolized version of capitalism where companies have been allowed to eat their competition unrestrained for almost half a century and therefore, the purchasing power and wages and the rights of the vast majority of people in society are extremely degraded. Again, a machine can do another slice of the workforce’s jobs faster (if not better?) Nothing changes there, just goes faster.
BIAS
We live in a racist patriarchy with bias at every level of society including in our computer programs. And it already seems like it’s picked that up extremely efficiently. It’s also proven out the bugaboo that if you wait long enough, everything in popular discourse ends in transphobia these days.
MILITARY
We live in the military-industrial complex where 20% of our federal budget goes to defense. The air force has already admitted its fancy new planes cost too much, (at 1.6 trillion over their lifetime, I would say, you think?) How do we balance how cheap a human is with how efficient a computer is? Who makes that call? Seriously?
LABOR
Oh, there will be new jobs. Just like when factories automated, and you could go from working a station at a factory to repairing the robot that did your job before. So the slide that has been taking place for decades in the blue-collar world of service work and factory work will hit computer work.
Contrary to a lot of critics, I don’t think it will feel that different. It feels like the end of the world for a lot of people because it’s personal this time, but it’s been like this for literally decades for a lot of the country and nobody really noticed. I hope they do!
WHAT COULD THIS HAVE BEEN LIKE, IF WE HAD A DIFFERENT WORLD?
Now the fun part. Let’s actually world build a new world. One that is not this one!
ECONOMY
There’s a version of the world where there’s strong competition in the economy and where automating writing could be one more step in the humanity-wide project to free everybody from work, as the 19th-century economist Keynes guessed was going to happen next. He thought we’d all be down to 15-hour work weeks by now.
Think about this statement. Really hear it: there is not enough work for everyone.
We have automated so much, we can meet everybody’s needs and most wants without needing everyone to work full-time to do it. We don’t have enough work to do!
It could have been a day of humanity-wide rejoicing. We can now get all of our needs met with a faction of the work! Wahoo!!!
Instead, we have all of those resources concentrating in a few bank accounts while we actually work more and longer and harder.
MILITARY
There’s a version of the world where the arms race slows down and even reverses, and chat GPT can be used in further de-escalation of conflict, helping to translate across cultures, where we use proxy competitions like the Olympics and culture to compete with each other.
BIAS
There is a version of the world where we truly invest in excising bias from society and finding true quality with AI. It could be a huge help in that goal leveling the playing field of resumes and cover letters and all of the other baloney correspondence you need to know how to do to play this game that so many people never learn, or folks with English as a Second Language could not do before now.
ART
There’s a version of the world where this lack of needing to work results in more artists creating more cool stuff, and nobody feels the need to ask AI to churn out dreck because they’re also doing okay. I personally would love a version of this program where I could upload only my own stuff so I’m not stealing from anybody else, but being able to ask a program to read these books and figure out what I named the barista two hundred pages ago that would be super nice.
LABOR
It’s just our luck that a time in history that will require a breathtaking amount of collective action to protect everybody is corresponding with a cult-like devotion to individual success and therefore individual failure at every level. Will this be the lever that finally breaks us out of the delusion that we don’t need each other? That it’s not cheating to work together, but the only way we survive? And this half-century project of filling a couple of bank accounts as full as they can get is at least, an inefficient, at most, horrifying way to run an entire civilization?
That’s not reality. That’s a belief we’ve all signed onto, even our unsentient chatbots.