I fear they will not be kind to us
For years intellectuals in the working class turned a blind eye to the struggles of manual laborers of the working class. Intellectuals promulgated norms that can be almost impossible to keep up with without a tertiary education, and punished people who violated them. Rather than reaching out in a spirit of grace, we burnt with the spirit of law. We neglected unionism. Economists scoffed as blue collar work was automated giving only hollow assurances that it wouldn’t create unemployment in the long-term. Op-ed writers told miners to learn to code.
There were, of course, noble exceptions. However the phenomenon of a haughty professional-managerial class disconnected from the political and economic concerns of blue collar work- from cleaners to the handful of factory workers still remaining in OECD countries- is rooted in truth.
Now, if, as seems quite likely, we start shedding intellectual jobs to AI- from psychologists to lawyers to copywriters- do you think the factory workers and electricians are going to take kindly to our pleas for political solidarity?
»»Help me, help me, you’ve got to help me save my job where I send four emails a day.««
I certainly don’t think the capitalists are going to be kind. If you look at the dynamic between tech workers and tech CEOs, for example, it’s crystal clear that they fucking hate their court scribes. They dislike having to hire a bunch of tech workers who:
A) Think they are smarter than their bosses (and usually are)
B) Believe a lot of stuff their bosses consider woke nonsense and
C) Get in the way of their bosses view of themselves as lone geniuses who have practically invented all of the tech their companies use and
D) Have real negotiating power and leverage in employment negotiations and can’t be easily swapped in and out because of their specialization and project knowledge.
The fights at Twitter are just the extreme type of this. Tamer versions play out all the time. Bosses hate intellectual workers for their perceived haughtiness, their political demands, and their bargaining power. They will rejoice in using transformers to shed our jobs.
We need to work together to demand a just transition to an AI world. The tragedy is that since Bernie, there has been some progress made on reuniting the manual and intellectual sections of the working class- just not enough progress. Millennials and Zoomers who would have once quietly joined the PMC have tried to build political alliances with the rest of the working class. Perhaps if we hurry there’s time to build these alliances before the models come for our jobs.
Certainly, it’s time to stop faffing about with denial and table-thumping about “stochastic parrots” and start working on political projects around AI, jobs and just transitions.
Writing
I have always wanted to be a writer. There is nothing particularly beautiful about my writing, at least ordinarily, but I do have some measure of talent for creating and conveying ideas.
I now find myself wondering, will that kind of writing- inventing new thoughts and sharing them- last a longer or shorter time than Belles-lettres writing with beautiful prose but without much by way of original ideas?:
On one hand, perhaps, it will be harder for large language models and their multimodal descendants to have original thoughts- so perhaps idea focused writing will eke out survival longer.
On the other hand, perhaps Belles-lettres will persist longer, because even if machines can emulate it, humans value that kind of aesthetic achievement by human beings, loving writing that is more than a vessel for ideas.
Who can know?
What I will say though is that I’m not optimistic about my future in writing. If cultural changes- the rise of recorded music mostly- were enough to wipe out poetry once the most respected form of writing, I don’t doubt that a flood of quality machine written essays could wipe out blogging and other forms of popular and human essay writing.
I was never in doubt that my writing would probably fail to change the world, much as I tried until I wept. I have no doubt that GPT-4 alone is not yet ready to replace human writing. Nonetheless, watching the portal slowly close not just for me, but maybe for everyone is like watching as a friend on a ship floats toward the horizon, knowing you’ll not see them again.
For a long time I have wondered why people would want to even participate in AI. History shows us "owners" have no compunction to not replace as many workers as possible. They have shown no compunction to not actually mow down (literally) strikers or those who challenge their authority. Oh, well. AI is the better future for employers (or maybe not). But I do not understand that people somehow think it's "cool" and know it isn't when consumers flock to movies of the dystopian AI future. Of course it will not be a war of humanity against machines, but of humanity who (think) they have control of machines to wage war against humanity (they think) don't. But you know Native-Americans did get guns, didn't they. But they were also replaced weren't they?