Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
I have no objection to watching frenemies and office rivals being made redundant in the machine age. But I was wondering what you thought about automation. Friend or foe?
Dwight Schrute, Scranton, PA
While some people like to stay in shape by taking barre classes or doing high intensity interval training, I stay healthy—at least mentally—by savaging tech triumphalists and their “advances” at every turn. Over the years, I’ve pilloried everything from social media, to meme culture, to Google Glass. Why, back in the early aughts, I even took after poor harmless DVDs, as VHS was wending its way toward extinction. Sensible Luddites would be ashamed of that last stand. I should be, too—after all, now that DVDs are on their way out, even I have moved on to streaming video like the rest of the bleating herd. And yet, I’m not.
In retrospect, my DVD-aggression seems peevish and shortsighted, like shooting an ant with an elephant gun. DVDs hardly represented The Singularity. But so what? I’d overreact less to the forced obsolescence perpetually being inflicted upon us if only my fellow sheeple reacted more. Especially when the obsolescence being planned isn’t that of Blockbuster Video, but rather, of their very selves and the vocations that allow those selves to buy the iCrap and other techno-narcotics which render them so comfortably numb. Once The End of Work comes, as so many techno-futurists predict, and we’ve involuntarily tagged out with our robot counterparts, leaving us endless time for leisure, what, precisely, will we pay for all this leisure with? With micropayments from the data collectors at Google for our hentai porn searches? With memories of relevance?
Instead, Americans play the short game: forever standing at attention with their ears cocked toward Silicon Valley, listening for their master’s voice to tell them what’s next, assuming that next is something they’ll even be permitted to partake of. (A very large assumption in the era of automation, the declared purpose of which is to cancel humanity right out of the equation.) This leaves tetchy Jeremiahs like myself wondering if technology is serving us, or if we are serving it, along with the tech world’s moral-pygmy billionaires who root for us to hollow out our way of life in the interest of convenience and push-button commerce. I will not name names, here, though one rhymes with “Sleazos.” (Full hypocrisy disclosure: even as brick-and-mortar retail collapses all around us, I have placed 61 Amazon Prime orders in 2017 alone. Just as with Oxycontin, technological addiction/convenience is dangerous precisely because even when we recognize its detrimental effects, we have next-to-no willpower to resist it. Particularly when it comes with no state taxes and free two-day shipping.)
“These are the days of miracle and wonder,” Paul Simon sang in 1986, on his Graceland album. I was a junior in high school at the time, and I bought it on cassette, back in the innocent-lamb years when artists expected to get paid for their art, and when they had a physical location to sell it, called “record stores,” which largely no longer exist. Unlike Simon, I’m uncertain that 1986 represented a high-water mark of miracles and wonders in the form of technological advancement. Some of us remember it as the year IBM introduced its first laptop, the PC Convertible, weighing in at a svelte 12 pounds. It was also the year the space shuttle Challenger exploded during takeoff, killing seven crew members. While we still mourn their loss, I sometimes wonder if those rocket men’n’women got out just in time, before more insidious forms of technology went on to kill the rest of us. Or at least to kill what’s left of our souls, those having largely gone the way of record stores.
In the interest of keeping readers awake, I will not prattle on about the perils of perpetually asking algorithms to do for us what we’ve traditionally done for ourselves. Nor on the science of the benefits of people feeling useful, of not feeling extraneous, and of having purpose. Except to say that hardly a day goes by that my email inbox isn’t larded up with some new clickbait doomsday scenario about all the jobs that will disappear in the next 10 to 30 years, due to algorithms and automation. Why, as I was writing this very column, a story from The Verge landed on me (the verge that The Verge refers to, presumably, being the verge of extinction). Its headline informs us that “Robots and AI are going to make social inequality even worse, says new report.”
The story details how a report by the UK charity Sutton Trust posits that not only will artificial intelligence and robots lead to massive job loss over the next few decades—estimates vary wildly but regularly put that number as high as two-fifths of American jobs disappearing in the next 15 years—but it will widen the gap between the rich and the poor, with those who started on top staying there, and those who didn’t having ever fewer cracks at social or economic mobility.
And it’s not just assembly line workers who need fear being replaced by robots anymore. The study hedges that “softer skills” will now be rewarded, those such as “confidence” and “communication.” But putting a premium on those attributes nearly makes journalism sound like a growth industry, as it boasts no shortage of cocky practitioners who are incapable of shutting up. Yet fewer than half of newspaper jobs from 15 years ago still exist. And even respectable journalistic institutions like the Washington Post have taken to automating some of their journalism, too.
Scoff, if you must, that it will be impossible to tell the Washington Post’s robot columnists from their real ones. But the point here is that once we head down this road—and we are already well past the first few rest stops—nobody is irreplaceable. Just Googling “jobs that will be replaced by automation” presents an endless array of slideshows (those churnalism gimmicks that have largely replaced stories) detailing how every occupation from bank tellers to doctors, from financial analysts to movie stars, stand in danger of being replaced by an automated version of themselves.
All of which can make things hard on a high school guidance counselor. Or say, on a father of two teenage sons, such as yours truly, who would love to channel them into a field that will stimulate and enrich them, but who has no earthly idea what field will even be around a decade from now. Or whether that field will bar entry to everyone other than the progeny of HAL 9000.
Every once in a while, it pays to heed the warnings of sensible technologists—who tend to stand out, since there’s not that many of them. Jaron Lanier is a virtual reality pioneer, works at Microsoft Research, and has turned himself into a steady cyber-skeptic, second guessing much of the techno-utopianism that afflicts his tribe like a bad rash. Seven years ago, he wrote an important book, You Are Not A Gadget, that gains more relevance with every technological lurch forward. As he himself experienced blowback for questioning the beneficent wisdom of our new Dear Leaders, he writes:
More and more, it seems, the technology billed as freeing humanity is now being used to replace it outright. The car is, quite literally, becoming the driver. Lanier bemoans the missionary reductionism that smothered the Internet with the rise of web 2.0, as the wonderful strangeness of individuality and personhood gradually came to be “leached away by the mush-making process,” with everything from Facebook organizing people into multiple-choice identities to Wikipedia seeking “to erase point of view entirely.” Lanier goes on:
While Lanier wasn’t talking about automation or AI specifically here, there is of course no faster slide to reducing individual expression than by eliminating the individual altogether. Which seems to be the animating motivation of the architects of the near-future economy.
But the principle that everyone is replaceable does bring some comfort. For just the other day, I came across a heartwarming piece in Computerworld. It explored the research of Evans Data Corp, which surveyed 550 software developers, asking them about the most worrisome aspect of their careers. Ranking second and third, respectively, was that the platform they were working on would become obsolete (23 percent) or wouldn’t catch on (14 percent). But what kept a plurality of them up at night (29 percent) is that they and their development efforts would be replaced by artificial intelligence. In other words, the people who are designing the machines to replace us live in abject fear of being replaced by the machines.
To which I had a one-word reaction: “Good.” Maybe that’s not the most charitable impulse. So forgive me, software developers. For now, anyway—and no thanks to you—I’m only human.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
