Why AI Isn't Going To Take Our Jobs: and a Holiday Special!
The last free Webworm of 2022 - see you next year for more weird deep dives into the internet... and beyond!
Hi,
This is it. This is the week. Christmas? No. It’s my birthday.
I feel a sense of gratitude and relief as 2022 winds to a close. This year has been big.
Thank you.
We’re about two years deep — and this year we fucked with a megachurch. We also took a look at my old cooked school, Bethlehem College — and went inside a secret Hillsong meeting. I guess you could say this year was a bit of an exorcism from my past. And going on your comments — maybe it was an exorcism for a lot of us.
In the course of over 100 newsletters this year we made t-shirts and raised money for Rainbow Youth, while a Hare Krishna decided to call me “c**t face”. My landlord reminded me that people can be kind, I explored my own face-blindness, and Louis Theroux talked to me about that rap.
Thanks for spending this year here with me on Webworm. I’ve had a blast.
Arise Church has not.
With that in mind, I’ve made the Webworm, Arise! podcast open to everyone this Christmas. It was released for paying members back in November — but I think Christmas seems like a good time to spread it further.
This podcast and live event was made available first to paying Webworm subscribers — as they keep the lights on! Consider becoming a paid member if it doesn’t cause you any financial hardship. It goes towards paying writers, lawyers, and giving me the time to do this thing! In return you get a bunch of extra stuff, like today’s newsletter, but in podcast form — plus my list of best music and films of 2022.
For Christmas, and the last special of the year, you can get 50% off a membership here, if that helps ($3.50 US a month):
Okay.
This time of the year sees many people taking time off (I am attempting to take a week!), or at the very least fantasising about taking time off. Which raises the question of why any of us are working in the first place. For some it’s fulfillment and meaning — for most it’s putting food on the table. It’s a simple case of survival.
But the thing is, we don’t really think about why we work until something comes along to make us go “Oh, fuck, is my livelihood going away?”
That happened this month with the arrival of a cheery little chatbot called ChatGPT:
The headlines went on and on — as people from a variety of careers, or imagined careers, went “Uh oh.”
Others went “Woo hoo”, imagining a life where they wouldn’t have to work. There was an incoming utopia where we could escape capitalism, the machines we invented finally freeing us from the burden of work; of countless hours spent on a factory floor, or glued to our computers.
The reality? Well — Hayden Donnell, one of my favourite Webworm contributors, weighs in.
Happy holidays,
David.
Bad News: ChatGPT Isn't Going to Take Our Jobs.
Sorry, but the economy just won't allow it.
by Hayden Donnell.
In a recent viral video, a doctor makes up a patient and inputs their medical history and symptoms to the AI chatbot ChatGPT. “A patient presents with pleuritic chest pain and sinus tachycardia,” reads one indecipherable sentence. “They have a background of a recent colon cancer anterior resection”.
The chatbot not only lists investigations for the doctor to order and possible causes for the patient’s chest pain, but accurately diagnoses them with a blood clot in their lungs. “This is my job,” the doctor exclaims. “This is what we do. This is going to change the role of doctors in healthcare.” His video is captioned: what jobs will go redundant and what jobs will be reshaped?
That same question is being asked in other parts of the media. The Guardian has interviewed Arizona State University academic Dan Gillmor, who says the chatbot is writing better than many of his idiot students. “Academia has some very serious issues to confront,” Gillmor says.
The Telegraph calls ChatGPT a “scarily intelligent robot” who can do my job better than me, to which I say ‘fcuk u, The Telegraph’. The New York Times has printed something by Paul Krugman which I can’t read because I’ve run out of free articles this month, while another New York Times article reprinted in the free-to-access Straits Times says ChatGPT could be the beginning of the end of all white-collar knowledge work, and a precursor to mass unemployment, or just another transitory tool mainly used by students and “Twitter jokesters”.
The prophecies of leisurely days to come have been rebuffed by some commentators who say that ChatGPT just isn’t good enough yet.
On CNet, Jackson Ryan puts that down to its inability to separate fact from fiction or interpret and explain the depths of human experience. “ChatGPT won’t be heading out into the world to talk to Ukrainians about the Russian invasion. It won’t be able to read the emotion on Kylian Mbappe’s face when he wins the World Cup,” he writes.
But perhaps a better reason why ChatGPT won’t take our jobs is because tech never has. Even with my meagre skills, I’ve already survived the internet, the smartphone, and Pokémon Go. No matter what gizmos the nerds at Silicon Valley invent, or how many monkeys Elon Musk murders to build our brain chips, our economic and cultural systems will still condemn us to toil.
The idea that we’ll one day be able to live lives of blissful indolence while robots carry out our busywork isn’t new. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted future generations would work 15 hours a week in a paper titled ‘Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren’. He believed that as machines improved the productivity of our labour, people would be able to work less.
Obviously Keynes was horribly wrong. We’re working as much as we ever have. But he was right about the robots. Many of the jobs people did in 1930 have been replaced by automation. We don’t send small children down chimneys anymore, no matter how many applications I send to the council. Some jobs are obsolete.
The problem is they’ve been replaced with other jobs.
A bunch of economics boffins at NPR came up with theories on why that is, saying Keynes underestimated our desire for competition. LeBron James, they say, doesn’t need another $80 million contract, but he gets one anyway.
The obvious retort is that LeBron James gets to play basketball, which he enjoys. Gordon from accounts isn’t working because of the pure thrill of the ledger, nor out of an insatiable bloodlust for becoming the best book balancer. It’s unlikely even his salary is a source of great competition. Most people, I suspect, just want to have a nice life.
I like anthropologist David Graeber’s theory better. In his book Bullshit Jobs and its precursor essay ‘On The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, he says Keynes’ prediction failed to materialise because society invents pointless roles in order to maintain the dominance of financial capital. “The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger,” he says.
To ward off that threat, it has crafted a system through a century of trial and error where people are employed for the sake of being beholden to employment, and perversely, the less useful a job is — the more it generally seems to be paid.
Graeber thinks 30 to 60% of jobs meet the criteria for being bullshit. That’s contentious and open to critique. But a quick scan of the nearest job site will generally confirm his point about the relationship between salaries and actual worth.
If work was tethered to the value we provide society, nurses, garbage collectors, supermarket workers, and delivery drivers would be some of the best-paid people around, second only to smug media commentators. Instead they’re paid way below objectively useless jobs like stock trader, middle manager, or being David Farrier.
Work isn't just about providing value to society; it's about assigning us our place in it. Technologies like ChatGPT prove we’re capable of producing the kind of semi-miraculous advances that could provide for our needs and decrease our workload. The fact they instead seem to morph us into account managers or bloggers suggests a structural problem at play.
At the risk of sounding like Karl Marx, our economy requires struggling workers to create capital and an army of “reserve labour” that’s made destitute and miserable in order to serve as a warning to the employed classes of what will happen if they fall out of line. At the risk of sounding like The Simpsons, the machinery of capitalism is oiled with the blood of the workers.
It’s not our lack of robot delivery drones or advanced enough chatbots that’s keeping us chained to our desks; it’s an extractive system that only works if most people are struggling to get by.
Robots making unemployment legitimate, or even virtuous, would weaken our incentives to produce profits for our parasitic rulers. Imagine how horrible that would be. Sorry, but the economy forbids it.
AI won’t reduce our working weeks to 15 hours any time soon. If we want more leisure time, it might be time to stop looking to Silicon Valley, and start looking at 18th Century France. Or failing that, at least toward your nearest union.
-Hayden Donnell.
David again.
Happy Holidays to you. And Happy Birthday to me.
See you in 2023 — and again, the special is on till Dec 25. Thanks for being here.
David.