Your job is already gone

You just may not know it yet.

In 1999, David Bowie gave an interview to BBC.

During the course of this freewheeling chat the interviewer, Jeremy Paxman, asked Bowie what the big deal was about the internet. Bowie responded presciently that the internet would change everyone’s life. Paxman was not convinced. The internet was just a tool, he contested.

Fast forward to today. We know who was right.

A few days ago, I wrote a newsletter about the awesome power of the AI-chatbot, ChatGPT, to mimic human writing. That newsletter is here.

I’ve now written a column about my interactions with the chatbot and what I think it portends for the future. Questions about creativity and authenticity are no longer philosophical anymore. They’re very real.

What does all of this mean for you?

Your reaction to AI can be one of incredulity like the BBC interviewer, Paxman. “It’s just a tool,” you may whisper. Or you may see it’s true capability like Bowie.

The short-and-sweet answer is that your job as you knew it does not exist anymore.

There is no going back to how we were before the bombs set off last year. How exactly AI will challenge and change your job depends on what you do (and how people now and in the future imagine utilities for it), but a transformational change may be coming faster than you think. Every AI-system is different and suited for a different task. But if you’ve engaged with anyone of the myriad that can write, create art, make music, or code, you know that this is only the beginning.

Think internet level changes.

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There’s an article in the satirical newspaper The Onion with the made-up quote that captures the zeitgeist of the moment—

“Sure, for now it can only replace manual laborers, but it’s just a matter of time before AI figures out how to replace useful people, like CEOs.”

Automation and AI were fine when they took jobs or lowered wages for jobs that were offshore, low-paying, or manual. But anyone in the “skilled” workforce already knows how much of a sham the term “skilled” is. Same with the “knowledge” economy.

The first onslaught came in the realm of education. That’s where you see the headlines now with teachers changing curriculum because students are cheating using AI. But this is just the start.

If you’re an engineer, then you probably already know that AI can code and though it makes mistakes, it will only get better. If you’re a writer or journalist, you know that AI can churn out acceptable copy in flawless English. If you’re in any professional occupation you know that AI can write good template emails, cover letters, and even basic strategic plans for your industry. If you’re an artist or photographer, well you know that AI has Hoovered up images from the internet and can now create copyright free images parasitizing off your blood, toil, and artistic sensibilities. AI systems can predict the shapes of proteins, offer shortcuts for creating drugs, help diagnose diseases from images on you scans.

And this is just the start.

I don’t mean to say that you will lose your job (though certainly if you’re in content-writing you might). Every poorly-written clickbaity article I see now on the internet now I think a chatbot could have written better for free.

Sean Thomas has a piece in The Spectator entitled “AI is the End of Writing” in which he predicts the following—

The machines will come for much academic work first – essays, PhDs, boring scholarly texts (unsurprisingly it can churn these out right now). Fanfic is instantly doomed, as are self-published novels. Next will be low-level journalism, copywriting, marketing, legalese, tech writing; then high-level journalism will go, along with genre fiction, history, biography, screenplays, TV drama, drama, until eventually a computer will be able to write something like Ulysses, only better. The only prompt will be ‘write a long amazing novel on whatever’.

Will any writers survive? A few human brand-names might be used to promote expensive fiction written by the machines. Memoir and travel writing might be OK (aha!) because computers can’t go to war, get addicted or sip excellent mojitos in the Maldives. Perhaps there will be a genre of resistance literature, stuff that’s not as good as the machine stuff but has a radical emotional value, because it is ours, because it has survived. We still buy rough artisanal pottery, and admire wobbly vernacular architecture, because of the deep human emotions embodied.

The entire essay is worth reading, though I disagree with parts. Humorous writing will survive because AI is terrible at satire, joke-cracking, and plot-twists. It doesn’t know what we find funny yet.

We already have a sizable population that is incapable of being alone with their thoughts and that cannot muster the patience to read an entire book, but instead must get information in short-burst tweets and videos.

Add to that the inability to synthesize and articulate ideas by going though the process of struggling with words and being wrong. That’s what writing was about when we had to do it ourselves.

What chance is there for ingenuity, creativity, and vulnerability if writing, making music, and painting are done for you?

(Cocreated by me and DALL-E 2)

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So, how does AI actually work?

There are a couple of ways to answer this. There’s the expert approach in this wonderful video —

Then there’s also this wonderful podcast episode.

But in a different context, cartoonist Sidney Harris got it completely right. :)

No one knows exactly how many AI systems that use deep learning actually do what they do.

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Endnote:

My favorite Indian science podcast is back! Do listen.

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That’s it for now. In the words of ChatGPT - “Join me in being real.”

Take care,

Anirban

(I’m on mastodon and on Linkedin).