Last edition, I let ChatGPT write the editorial for me, and, if you recall, it wasn’t that impressive. The attempts at humour weren’t funny, the information was occasionally incorrect and it felt like it was written by a school kid.
But, I mentioned, it had only been doing this for a couple weeks. What happens in a couple years? Does it mean that my job is going away?
Well, not completely, and not yet. There’s going to be the need for … information curators (let’s call them “editors”) for at least the foreseeable future. Because while ChatGPT can write equally well on the topic of belt buckles as it can on the history of Tumbler Ridge, only one of these topics is of interest to a general audience comprised of Tumbler Ridgians.
But ChatGPT, and it’s brother DALL-E (which does AI generated art) is a shot across the bow for a bunch of people who’ve been moving into the future with a self-assured cockiness. “Sure, someday there’ll be self-driving mining trucks,” these tall, handsome people have said (okay, fine, it was me, I said), “but I’m a writer and photographer. Computers will never be able to do creative work.”
And then, computers started doing creative work, and the world shifted.
And I realized, we have planted the seeds of our own destruction.
One of the chief tenants of our economic system—capitalism, for any of you who haven’t been paying attention—is to maximize profit, which can be done by increasing revenue or decreasing cost.
It was 110 years ago—1913—when Henry Ford took one of the most important steps towards the latter with the invention of the assembly line.
Ford didn’t invent the car, but before that, automobiles were bespoke: hand built, with a few people working to construct the whole car.
Ford’s invention was to break down the production of the auto into discrete tasks, and have un-skilled labourers do one thing. Someone might work in the plant and their job was to attach the headlights. They knew nothing about carburettors or fuel pumps or steering wheels or running boards, but they could install ten headlights an hour, every hour for ten hours, every day for five days a week, every week of every year for decades.
Which might sound boring. And you’d be right. So less than 50 years later, Ford’s big competition, GM, began using industrial robots. If all a person was doing was picking up a headlight, putting it in a certain place and attaching it to the car, it wasn’t that hard for a machine to do exactly the same thing. And the company wouldn’t have to pay the robot $5/hour to do it.
Man creates machine, machine replaces man.
The argument has always been the machines are just replacing of unskilled labourers, not the jobs that require skill and talent. But, since that first robot was added to the line in the 60s, they’ve taken on an ever increasing role in the construction of the modern automobile.
Yes, they have taken over the boring, repetitive tasks, as well as the dangerous ones, but they’re also starting to take over all the tasks.
Teslas, for instance, are 75 percent built by robots, while other companies have varying degrees of automation.
According to McKinsey Global Institute, as many as 375 million workers globally may need to switch professions by 2030 due to advancements in automation.
And yes, these are mostly jobs for unskilled labourers, but these are jobs held mostly by women and minorities. Basically the socially vulnerable and the least able to afford to lose their jobs.
Let’s look at an example that we are faced with on a more regular basis.
At the local FreshMart, all the tills are manned by humans. But go to a slightly larger centre, like Dawson, and you’ll find automated check-outs in the grocery stores and WalMart.
That’s just the start; in the states, Amazon has stores where people can tap their phone when they enter, grab what they want and walk out again without having to check-out. Instead, cameras and sensors track what people have picked up, and automatically charge people when they leave.
But cashiers? These are low-paying entry level jobs. One could argue that most people don’t want to do these jobs. (Indeed, as an alternative to automated check outs, some businesses have started to bring in Temporary Foreign Workers to fill the gaps.)
And we haven’t really cared, because it frees us up to do higher skilled (and higher paying) jobs.
At least, that was the situation until recently, and now? Now all bets for the future are off.
Now we have self-driving mining trucks. We have computers making faster and more accurate diagnoses in the emergency room. We have self-propelled robots wandering the streets of cities, delivering food and mail. Amazon is even working on being able to deliver packages by automated drones.
Computers have taken over the stock market, and are set to take over for investment analysts as online sites act as investment brokers, letting AI make the important decisions.
The list goes on. It’s exciting, and it’s scary. And we could start to go after the machines with pitchforks and torches (or hammers and flamethrowers), scared that they’ll render us no longer useful.
Or we could look at the society we’ve build and figure out the next step. Through the capitalistic drive for efficiency and lower cost, we have rendered ourselves useless. Do we let power and capital become more and more concentrated in the hands of the few? Do we try and revamp the system? Or do we start looking for the next step after capitalism, a Star Trek-style utopia where people do things because they want to, not because they have to survive? Do we start looking for the next step?
More on that next issue.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
