The Ugly Truth About AI
A lot more jobs are replaceable than anyone wants to admit
Much of the outrage over AI revolves around creative work. This is appropriate.
What separates humans from machines (and AI) is this ability to create something unique and personal. Swapping out human creatives for machine-generated “slop” kills our belief we are each of us beautiful and worthy.
It is a kind of assassination.
I get that, I really do. But this isn’t about that.
This is about another fear, rarely admitted to.
And that fear is that we are in fact replaceable because we spend the vast majority of our time performing tasks that are not unique or creative. They are rote, repeated tasks that ask nothing of our unique experiences. Our exquisite insights. Of us.
Think of a bank teller. What do they generally do? They receive your account information and then perform a transaction, using a computer terminal to interact with the bank’s central systems. It’s clerical work, by definition.
Could this be done by a machine? Of course.
They are called ATMs. Automatic Teller Machines. Open 24x7, ATMs have been the “AI” replacement for tellers for 50 years. They are the reason why all bank drive-throughs are closed now. During Covid, most banks shut off human tellers inside as well. Very reluctantly, tellers were brought back. Not because their work couldn’t be automated. But because a certain customer base demanded a human interaction.
And this is where my friend Jonathan Evison would jump in, shouting, “Yes! It’s about human interaction you twat! We need more of that, not less!” Only he’s a writer, so it would be said in a more sophisticated way, no doubt.
I don’t disagree from a psychological/sociological perspective. We need real human interaction more than ever. But clinging to rote jobs is not the answer. And like it or not, most human jobs are rote. Or have significant rote components that can be automated.
Will be automated.
This is the ugly truth no one talks about. That the majority of human energy collectively is spent on rote work, not creative work. And that can, and will, be automated.
