The Friendemy
Artificial intelligence is one of the cultural buzzwords as of late. It conjures images of science fiction, machines taking over, HAL 9000 and SkyNet, and How about a nice game of chess?
While I think we’re still a ways off from the machines rising up against us, it’s not that aspect of AI that concerns me. What some have echoed, and what many more should be concerned about, is absolute complete unemployment.
This is different. This isn’t political. This isn’t an argument that can be won by electing red or blue. The massive unemployment we are approaching will not be a result of jobs being outsourced to another location. It won’t be (in some respects) a result of corporate downsizing, or a natural disaster that disturbs the social economic scaffolding holding up the ecosystem. It won’t be because the workers are not educated, or have a skilled trade. This massive wave of unemployment will be the result of the basic reason is they will be unemployable. They will become, in essence, human typewriters.
When was the last time you used a typewriter? Typewriters were a specialized technology when they debuted in the late 19th Century. They would go on to revolutionize office work, and dominate over a century, but eventually [computer] printers replaced them. It wasn’t that they didn’t improve over the hundred years. The industry wasn’t static. There was technical advancement from manual to electric to even installing a whiteout correct ribbon to fix clerical miscues. So why did we stop using such an innovative and technically sound device? They were replaced by something better.
Why use a typewriter to write your term paper when you can compose it on a screen, print off a copy, circle the typos, fix them again on the screen, and print out a final copy? Do you think the typewriter physically looked cleaner or better? Well, maybe in the beginning. Depending on the importance of the print copy a typewriter produced resume might have looked better than an old dot matrix version. In the beginning that is, but printers improved from dot matrix to ink-jets to lasers. Selection of which chosen was, is, based on budgeting and what quality level of printing is going to be needed. There is simply no reason to buy a typewriter anymore. Even more so, there isn’t a need to use one. The printer became the friendemy of the typewriter.
As is the case with AI, which can be described as the friendemy of humans. It’s going to be able to assist humans in ways we cannot imagine, but it also has the risk of making us irrelevant – to the point of being unemployable. Drones, self-driving cars, writing term papers, academic research – the ability to scan hundreds of thousands of documents to find a common thread. Medical diagnosis, and of course playing Jeopardy. Remember Watson? Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997. All these are not the future – they are the now, and yes, they’ve evolved exponentially.
Humans do not run the risk of being slaves to machines. We don’t think as fast. We don’t work as fast. We get tired. We have to be fed, and we definitely have to sleep. There’s a lot of upkeep. We also make mistakes. It’s a no contest.
I was told once by someone that self-driving cars are a dangerous thing. Some have even “driven off cliffs.” While not attempting to debate the claim my response was, okay, so self-driving AI cars make mistakes. No one said they had to be flawless. No one ever expected perfection. The bar is set at their human counterpart, and that’s pretty low. They don’t have to be perfect – they just have to have less accidents than humans. Another solid win for the friendemy. The self-driving AI vehicles, operating within proper parameters, are not going to play that game of chicken while merging in traffic from on-ramps. They’re not going to likely speed. They aren’t going to fall asleep at the wheel. They’re not going to tailgate. They are not going to cut off other vehicles in traffic, and they’re not going to drive drunk. If anything they might be driving their unemployed, drunk, human counterparts home in the dead of night because they’ve replaced them in the workforce and they can’t get a job. So the human future might just be the local tavern.This is the future of AI. Not so much being enslaved by SkyNet, but becoming completely unemployable sitting in a pub bemoaning politicians who, red or blue, aren’t going to be able to do a thing about it. This is the cost of the technical age. Humans, if not careful, will simply become irrelevant, and there’s nothing worse than that.