AI and Automation Anxiety

Work is not just an economic thing, it is also existential; it gives meaning to human existence.

Man verses machine is an age-old conflict archetype. Since the emergence of this conflict archetype machines have been growing in power and intelligence in all directions. The evolution of the thinking machines now stands at the threshold of a quantum leap, breaking completely with the past –the Open AI is here. We have heard of automating repetitive tasks, but that is not the question today. Instead of automating repetitive tasks, technology today is climbing the cognitive ladder. Is it too fast? Or is it that for doing the repetitive jobs we still have the cheap human labour around?

Automation Anxiety

The stress one goes through because of the fear of losing ones job to automation is real and happening. Work is not just an economic thing it is also existential; it gives meaning to human existence. Money could be provided and found, what about meaning? With infallible machines around there is a shrinking demand for human labour. Consider the limits placed on us, our heads can only get so big, our brains can only consume so much energy, we can only pay attention to so much at once, and we forget most of what we experience. Computers, on the other hand, can be the size of warehouses and consume as much energy as a city if need be; and they can remember anything and everything and attend to many streams of information at any one time. Ever since the great industrial revolution 1760-1840 automation anxiety is an unsolicited yet perpetual companion to the world’s working class.

Automation booms, like big data analytics, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning, are not only taking over the jobs of blue-collar workers in a factory but skilled white-collar professionals such as financial analysts, journalists, teachers, and doctors. Not even the art world is immune to automation: Last October, a painting generated by AI fetched a whopping $432,500 at a major art auction. Robots have encroached into the human territories of reason, logic and argument. Robots which can analyse 300 million newspaper articles and scientific journals to formulate its arguments are winning debates against the best of human debaters. Every waves of mechanisation has caused difficulty and anxiety. With each new development, someone has faced the prospect of their livelihood or quality of life being changed irrevocably.

Automation

A hundred years ago in 1922 at a commencement address at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, United States, a professor said, “We are at the beginning of a revolution. It is giving us more machines. Faster machines, machines increasingly more intricate and complex. Life in the future will be speeded up infinitely beyond the present.” Not just in 1922, today and every time there is the beginning of a new revolution, many pay heed to it and others pay the price.

ChatGPT marks the beginning of a new revolution. Out of sheer thrill and mere concern we at Together got in touch with ChatGPT to make friends with it and make our jobs safe. It is fantastic: it does everything that you would do; ask questions, answer questions, play safe, admit mistakes, and more. Together made chatGPT to interview itself, write about itself, answer questions about itself, and chat GPT did it intelligibly; but the decision to make chat GPT interview itself was not it’s. That is the point; it can take orders, but can’t do a thing that is never done by humans before.

As I am writing I have a passing daydream. I see a future, though distant, free from the feudal master and slave relationship to master and machine relationship: you order and the machines do. The slaves will be set free. What human civilisation could not achieve in 70 million years, the machine civilisation will achieve in a few decades. The question, would the economic divide disappear?, wakes me up from my daydream. I think not. The rich will have rich machines and grow richer; and the working class, who now lost their jobs because of the advent of artificial intelligence, will continue using their occasional machines and doing their own jobs.

The World Economic Forum predicts 85 million jobs being lost because of AI, but read further, For centuries, automation has been destroying some jobs while creating other jobs, usually better paid and less gruelling, and driving economic growth and prosperity. AI is also able to generate new and more jobs. It predicts 97 million new jobs by 2025. Those who are displaced from their jobs, provided they have the access to the right education, can pivot into a new profession. When calculators were invented, automation anxiety hit a new high; they thought all who are in the business of numbers are going to lose their jobs. Yes, people lost jobs; but who? Yes, those who only knew, and did not make any effort to learn anything more than just to add and subtract.

We might have AI tools that do certain tasks and make new things possible, those who refuse to adopt such tools might find themselves at a disadvantage. A human mind is still required to bring the different elements together creatively and flexibly. As Tyler Cowen, an American economist, says, “If you and your skills are a complement to the computer (AI), your wage and labour market prospects are likely to be cheery. If your skills do not complement the computer (AI), you may want to address that mismatch. Ever more people are starting to fall on one side of the divide or the other. That’s why average is over.”

For survival remember the insights of Leopold Bloom, the fictional protagonist and hero of James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses, that first, technology could obviate arduous manual labor; second, that this would cost somebody a job; and third, that it would also create a job, but for a different person altogether. The solution is being that new person. The theory of diffusion of innovations, popularised by Everett Rogers, describes the pattern and speed at which new ideas, practices, or products spread through a population. For every new idea there would be innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. The same is going to be the case with Open AI, Chat GPT, and other things to come. Be an early bird if not the innovators. Upgrade as many times as the dates on your calendar; the future is here, so are opportunities.

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