The Opposite of A.I.
The Opposite of A.I.
Let's lay off the dystopia. Technology does not have to destroy in order to create.
It’s said that if you have a talking horse, nobody cares what it says. It’s enough that the horse talks at all. Artificial Intelligence, or the hype all around it, is a bit like that talking horse.
Each day comes a new example of what A.I. can do. Many are amazing, at least at first glance. Each day comes another story of how A.I. will eliminate jobs, disrupt companies, and destroy industries.
Each day, it seems, comes another talking horse.
It’s been a decade since IBM’s Watson promised a revolution in cancer treatment and Tesla promised an A.I. self-driving car. Every failure and limitation is waived off with the promise of increasingly rapid progress, with the next turn just around the corner.
“Just wait, who knows,” they say. “So much can happen in a year!”
Who has that kind of time? Since the stakes are so high. Let’s ask this horse some questions, and see what it has to say.
What Does the Horse Say?
I’ve noticed slow progress in the workaday places where I’d expect more impact from A.I. In my bank’s fraud detection, spell and grammar checking, numbered lists in MS-Word — well, everything in Office.
Perhaps that’s a drawback to having a talking horse. Maybe if you start talking to it, one grows reluctant to ask it to do unpleasant work.
The next to lose their jobs to A.I., according to news that I very much did not see coming, are models. Millions of beautiful people will be out of jobs, we are told, because AI-generated replicas will make them obsolete.
They’ll be in the good and probably grateful company of many others whose doom was foretold in earlier reporting. I’ve seen predicted the loss of jobs for writers, editors, truck drivers, marketers, accountants, pilots and lawyers (these from 2016!), and even doctors, teachers, and nannies.
Honestly, I was doing ok until this part about the nannies:
The question is how good can A.I. become, really? A lot of the nannies my neighbors have are really good at taking care of the kids, but they don't necessarily have the skills to teach the kids a computer language.
So, nannies are safe as long as they can code. Got it.
Don’t be Coarse, of Course
Here’s a fun tip. When you’re reading these stories, try replacing the term “A.I.” with the words “powerful yet unpredictable computer software.”
Like this:
Millions of beautiful models will lose their jobs, made obsolete by digital versions generated by powerful yet unpredictable computer software.
Among the jobs most likely to be replaced by powerful yet unpredictable software are teachers, school psychologists, and judges
Oh, now we’re having fun! This always makes me feel better.
“Bye bye models” “Adios animators!” I now see something like this every day. Even though I am required for my job not to feel anything about what stupid people say online, I admit that lately I do feel something.
I feel sad, and a little angry. It’s quite coarse to celebrate the prediction of the loss of thousands of jobs. Even if that prediction is based on extrapolations that you may not be fully qualified to understand, based on your experience playing computer video games, from your vantage point in your parents’ basement.
Wisdom Bottled Right from the Source
In retrospect, it may be true that not everything that has sprung from the Internet has been completely positive. There are social, economic, and ethical ramifications that we may never resolve. There’s “short form video”, internet addiction, social comparison, and the vexing slang terms “based” and “bae.” Comments were a bad idea. If we’re starting over with A.I., we should not allow comments.
But a more realistic view of history emerges from the post-war perspective of someone who began a much longer and more dangerous career as a teenager. They’d likely see long long hours working in an unsafe factory.
Computers, technology, and the internet have probably made work safer, enabled us to live longer, created jobs, created wealth, and improved access to democracy around the world.
Not always, but often, technology has lead to productivity increases and the quality of our work improves. Why shouldn't this be the focus of our optimism1 for A.I.?
If you were “disrupted” by the internet, if you worked in a book store or a travel agency, you probably see this differently. I can appreciate that. A.I. will change the world significantly, as much and as quickly as the internet, PCs, and smartphones did — maybe more, maybe even faster.
But are we really on the verge of eliminating millions of jobs overnight?
To Reinforce
Let’s travel to 2005 and take a look at the impact of sudden technological disruption. Smartphones arrived and disrupted taxis, and they certainly look very different today. There are 10X the number of professional drivers than before. A.I. promises (and promises) to replace drivers too, but for now we are left to argue about whether technology destroyed the taxi industry or created it.
Predicting massive job loss from A.I. is like standing in 2005, looking at a smartphone, and saying “bye bye taxis.” Even if you’re right, you’re wrong. And irrelevant, and annoying.
What we gain or lose from technology isn’t understood until we see it on a human scale. No matter how powerful or unpredictable the mysterious tech wizard seems, its greatest ability is to empower human talent and ingenuity, not replace it. This goes for the harms as well. Measuring the impact of social media on print journalism, for example, is foolish without also measuring the impact it’s had on our mental health.
The transistor, personal computer, and digital photography all eliminated earlier fields and replaced them with vastly larger industries. Their impact on our lives, our behavior, and the trade in our marketplaces was much greater than the impact measured on individual people, their professions, or careers. Counting the job losses associated with those disruptions would be a meaningless exercise.
Another item of housekeeping. I’d like to address people who are taking so much pleasure writing and commenting on the impact of A.I. on the workforce of the future. My friends, there is something I’d like you to read, and it’s called “the room.” Is now the right moment to gleefully predict the loss of jobs, because of something you just discovered on the internet?
Thousands of people — designers, writers, models — have lives and families that they’re already pretty worried about. Maybe your insights would be more welcome on a topic on which you are better-informed. If you want to shout desperately into the void about something mysterious and ephemeral in hopes it will become successful, God gave you Bitcoin.
Some Rules to Enforce
Maybe it’s a blind spot, but I’m often confused by the output of ChatGPT or Dall-E. Why are people so excited about this, again?
Then I remember the horse.
A “writer” produces writing, but that’s not all they do. I have to decide what to write. I have to ask and answer questions — before I start, while I’m working, and after I’m finished. I research a topic, I determine what my point of view is, and I decide which sources I want to rely on. I have to locate the window I was writing in, it was just here a minute ago.
Designers are also people who are more than the output of their work. They, too, ask questions: what’s this for, who are the customers, how do we want them to think or feel? What kinds of things do they use and like or hate today? Hey, what the fuck font is this? Can I use your Spotify login?
Do not reduce your understanding of someone to an example of the person’s output. If you do, then you compare that output to something an A.I. created, you’re going to get the wrong impression. You’ll get fooled, as so many have by so many talking horses. It’s like trying to understand medicine by studying a tooth, and then declaring that a dentist can be replaced by a 3D printer.
In his remarkable article on ChatGPT, Stephen Wolfram describes how it generates convincing text that feels very human. The compositions it generates are linguistically cogent, convincingly authentic, and lure us to imagine an intelligent author.
Wolfram shatters the illusion by dissecting what the A.I. knows before it starts, and how it thinks as it works.
He comes suddenly to this realization — something that every writer, in some sense, already knows: it’s much easier to write an essay than it is to decide what it’s about.
Here’s Wolfram:
In the past there were plenty of tasks—including writing essays—that we’ve assumed were somehow “fundamentally too hard” for computers. And now that we see them done by the likes of ChatGPT we tend to suddenly think that computers must have become vastly more powerful….But this isn’t the right conclusion to draw…instead what we should conclude is that tasks—like writing essays…are actually in some sense computationally easier than we thought.
Totally based, Stephen Wolfram.
Not all Jobs can be Outsourced
The signs are everywhere. We’re entering a dynamic, volatile, and potentially dangerous time. Be warned: none of us are safe from stupid predictions.
Human workers still have some work left to do at the office. As long as there are two people left in the company, we’ll need to work together. This will require emotionally intelligent people like you and me.
We spend our days, and sometimes nights, asking questions, deliberating the answers, collaborating, negotiating, making decisions, crying in the bathroom, managing people, managing each other, and trying to figure out who to eat lunch with.
A.I. is no good at any of this stuff. It all requires emotional intelligence or “EQ.” That’s the very opposite of what you get from A.I.
Plenty of jobs could be done by tech today, but aren’t. Why? Because computers are terrible at many things that A.I. does not address.
Disruptions from silicon, the transistor, the personal computer, the smartphone, and the internet all made a mess of things in their time. But the impact to our careers occur long after the changes to our lives and our behavior have begun. For the post part, that has not started yet.
Instability is inevitable. Jobs will be lost. Companies will fail. Industries will shift. Some careers will be altered, others may be destroyed.
Looking back, sometimes it seems like the internet destroyed everything. Other times, it seems like it created us all.
A.I. can’t take any jobs we don’t give it. It can’t take away our ability to work with one another, to solve problems, to lead and inspire young people, to know and love one another, to see around corners, and to pick challenges to overcome that help to make the world look more like a place we want to live and work.
Human and humane leadership is also a prerequisite for a workplace where humans and machines can work well together. We need empathetic, respectful leaders to ensure that A.I. is designed responsibly, with respect for original content creators. They’ll help us develop safeguards to ensure the tech is used in safe and ethical ways, and to make sure that the tools aren’t used to exploit unsophisticated people.
No Remorse for The Thief & The Horse
If you think people skills are on the way out as A.I. is on the way up, you could not be more wrong. Emotional intelligence has never been more important than it is at this moment. It is the tool we need to help us communicate and understand how we want to use this technology in our work and in our lives.
Crucially, this is a moment to protect and elevate our most inspiring and talented people. The youngest generation of future leaders should be encouraged to stretch towards opportunities to build, create, lead, and inspire.
I’m sickened by the idea that we’re sending the message that the scope of the opportunity in tech has somehow been reduced by this sloppy, silly commentary on A.I. We could be draining away meaning and purpose from our future in exchange for nothing more than a meaningless punch line.
That would be truly foolish.
It reminds me of another fable. This one is also about a talking horse. A thief is caught in the act, captured, and hauled before the King and Queen. They confer and order him to be summarily executed. The thief, thinking quickly, says “Queen, I have a mystical ability and a spiritual affinity with your prized Persian horse! Give me just one year, and I will teach your favorite horse to talk. If I fail, execute me.”
The royals confer again, they shrug, and agree to the thief’s bargain. As the guards lead the thief away towards the stables, another prisoner leans over and whispers “Fool! You’ll never teach the horse to talk. You’ll be executed for sure!”
“Just wait, who knows,” the thief replied. “So much can happen in a year!”
My old boss Scott Belsky at Adobe frames A.I. this way: a tool to be crafted responsibly and used to enhance the productivity of talented creators. He makes it look easy to talk about this subject in just the way I think it ought to be.