[This piece is appearing this weekend as a newspaper op/ed/]
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It’s an old story-- new technologies replacing the labor of people with well-developed and valuable skills.
Over thousands of years, many peoples around the world had individuals whose role it was to commit to memory, and pass along to future generations, the oral traditions of their cultures. Much in the Bible was passed orally through the generations before taking the form of written texts. The classics attributed to “Homer” – The Iliad and The Odyssey – were handed down as part of the Greek oral tradition for centuries, before ultimately being written down as the classics the world has known since.
In many cultures, the coming of writing – which is a technology – eliminated the role of the poets, storytellers, and singers who preserved the treasured texts of their societies.
In our own time, there’s the situation of the fabled taxi drivers of London. To be admitted to that elite group, ane has had to pass a test demonstrating one’s mastery of the extraordinarily complex map of London, with its thousands of streets and notable places. Typically, it takes someone three years of concentrated study to achieve such mastery.
Now has arrived the technology of the GPS, in which a sophisticated set of machines – containing reams of such information -- can swiftly generate a route from any point A to any point B. The traditional drivers maintain that their knowledge of the city remains superior, and it may well be. But likely only for now, as the technology continues to evolve and can be updated more continually than any human driver can hope to do.
(It has been some years, already, since computers have been programmed to play chess well enough to defeat even the greatest human players.)
One is reminded of various ways that various skilled artisans were displaced with the coming of the industrial age. (E.g. skilled weavers were displaced by mechanical looms.) Manufactured goods replaced hand-made goods in a number of areas, eliminating many of the craftsman of earlier times.
And then there’s agriculture, with the well-known statistics showing mechanization drove human labor off the land. (Agricultural workers were half the American workforce in 1870 but are now barely over 2%.)
All because of the ability of machines to do the work that once required the labor of human beings.
Lately, the coming of AI has raised new alarms about this old problem. How much of the work now done by people will Artificial Intelligence be able to do perhaps better and more cheaply?
(A sidenote: Some people fear that the coming of AI will constitute a greater threat to human civilization in other ways as well, either by putting too-great powers into the wrong human hands, or even having machines – having become much smarter than people – taking over. I don’t have any idea how realistic such threats are. I grew up in a world in which nuclear holocaust and environmental destruction were visible threats, and my mind seems equipped to understand those problems and what it might take to solve them. But by the time AI came on the scene, my mind was formed, and I find myself unable to visualize the dynamics that will determine how that force will unfold.)
With all that worrying going on, about people being displaced by AI, I’ve asked myself: How would I feel if AI led to machines that could do what I do, and do it better than I can?
I wouldn’t like it, that’s for sure. I love my work – I bet those weavers loved theirs, too, and those who memorized and performed the oral traditions of their cultures – and if there were no need for the likes of me to do it, there would be an empty place in my life.
Given my age – late seventies – I doubt that, in my lifetime, AI will be doing what I do. But the question still matters to me: I’ve always worked to leave a legacy, and it would feel a loss if I believed my legacy, too, would become obsolete after I’ve shuffled off this mortal coil.
I decided to check in on AI’s ability to do to me what the GPS is doing to the accomplished London taxi drivers. Some questions that I’ve been pondering about, regarding what’s going on in the human world around me, I posed to the current versions of AI.
What I found is that the AI systems came back with answers that reminded me of an exam paper – a “bluebook” – from a student who’d studied the texts well enough to regurgitate the ideas they’d encountered in the course. There was nothing in the answers that went beyond the conventional ideas I was familiar with. No originality, not creativity.
As impressive in its way as AI is, the one important thing that AI did not manifest at all was any kind of insight.
A big omission: my life’s work can be summed up as the effort to generate and communicate understandings that are 1) valid, 2) consequential, and 3) not generally known.
It’s that “not generally known” thing – insight – that AI showed no ability to fulfill. (Which makes sense, given that AI apparently “knows” only what the body know knowledge on the internet has told it.)
Time will tell whether, as some say, it is only a matter of time AI will have “Eureka!” (or “burning bush”) moments as well.