The machine can take my job, but not my passion
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords!
The problem isn't “AI”, whatever that means. The problem is the usual: That we have a technofascist billionaire ruling class that needs new toys to play with, that needs more confused and pliant subjects to click their ads or buy their products or their hype or whatever. That we live in the dying days of capitalism which has long ago stopped solving actual people's problems and instead sells ever new cures for ailments it itself has created, or at least better and better distractions. That we have entire generations of people who are dying to be heard, and the only way they feel this can happen is by becoming a brand, a product, mass media of one, themselves.
It's all a lie and (I hope) it's all coming down.
Back when we were still promised utopias, it was ones where the machines would take over all the menial labor, the thankless but necessary, the hard and dangerous, the work that keeps families apart, destroys people's health both physical and mental, the "unskilled labor" (a misnomer applied by complacent white collar workers).
Instead, “we” have built tools that relieve us from the burden of having to create poetry, create art, shape things, form connections and create community. The machine can speak for you. The machine can rhyme for you. The machine will write the love letter for you, after it wrote the dating app messages for you. Not long now until we have finally delegated everything that makes us human, so that we may fully focus ourselves on the drudgery of our day jobs, no matter what color the collar! Oh, haven't you heard? Your job is gone. It has been replaced not by universal basic income, by the schlaraffian utopia, leaving you to frolick naked in the garden of Eden humanity has finally built for themselves – no, it has been replaced by scrabbling for scraps. The machine writes its poetry under artificial photos while you struggle to make rent.
This whole thing is clearly unsustainable. Caught in the throes of AI psychosis, your boss' boss is posting on LinkedIn about how nontechnical staff have been launching three new products every week on average, while also wiping the floors and cleaning the coffee makers! The permanent exploitation of the local and global underclasses is starting to affect the very people who have gleefully participated in it in the past few years. If your job consisted mainly of manipulating symbols, say hello to your new robotic overlord. Your services will no longer be required. Until maybe, just maybe, the MBA class with nary an actual understanding of products or services or people will be forced to learn that you can only stack slop so high.
How many tokens for a soul?
Making life better for actual human beings is too hard to exploit. Between that and the complete lack of political willpower we have in the “Western” world, at the very least, it feels hard to imagine that things will get better again. That, instead of vaporizing yet another river to create disinformation and deepfakes, we could delegate the shit work to machines, freeing people up again to build community, to talk to each other, to find connection and work together. Instead of ever more individualization and decommunalization (I almost wrote “privatization” but that's too on the nose), we could be social animals, at peace with our existence.
Where do we go from here? I have no great answers – none that go beyond the usual call to rise up and make a better system from the ashes of the old – but I need to say it, if only to myself: Do not give up hope. None of this is inevitable. We can choose what we do with our lives, choose what to use our tools for – and what not. This is not a call to abolish all use of “AI” or technology. If you feel the tool is useful for you, go right ahead. But please, think hard about what you use your time and thought for. Are you making the world better for people? Are you pushing us back towards community, towards a real social life, towards hope?
It is all, quite literally, in our hands.