A 40-year-old album, generative AI and social disruption: we need to talk.
These are the days of miracle and wonder, Paul Simon sang 40 years ago now.
That Graceland album was controversial, but it was also a thing of wonder.
Decades later, the irony with which he sang The Boy in the Bubble is as searing as it was then.
The full lyrics are here -but consider these lines:
And I believe these are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires and baby
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry, don’t cry
It’s those “staccato signals of constant information” that have been the subject of debate in our house lately. (How apt a description of the digital world we now live in, which did not exist in August 1986) .
This week, a relatively small use of generative AI led to a big conversation.
GenAI and pride
I used Google’s Gemini to extract some information off public websites for an article I was working on – essentially, I had the tool do a copy-and-paste job. Gemini took less than a minute to do something that would have taken me 20 minutes or so (because the pages were broken up into small pieces of text).
As always in contract knowledge work, the profitability of a particular job depends on the time it takes: the faster and more efficiently you can get it done, the better. So that little bit of AI magic made my afternoon.
But when I told my family that generative AI had (again) saved me time, my son, aged 23, pushed back.
You’re being paid to do a particular job, using your expertise, he said. Using AI at all is an abuse of your contract with your employer.
Strong words, which are his forte.
He pointed out that he could be using AI in his job as a retail worker. He works in a front-of-shop role that requires a vast knowledge of multifarious products, so that he can point customers in the direction of the right purchase. He could be using AI to synthesise that information for him. Instead, he reads and learns and applies his mind; he tests the products himself.
He does all that for a salary that barely meets South Africa’s minimum wage.
Yet, he says: “I take pride in my work.”
The questions
Was I taking pride in my work by using Gemini to do some of the grunt work on that job? I’d argue that my editing and writing skills were the major players in the work that I did, and that the eventual product will be human-generated, to the best of my ability. (And I always declare my use of AI, however minimal.)
But the uncomfortable question remains: why are we allowing machines into the place where our minds and our hearts and our dignity reside? Is the social disruption that is surely coming something we actually want?
Those of us with the luxury of long years of work experience have ways, perhaps, to try to navigate the changes that are coming; young people have very few defences against tools that are growing in capability and being made by that “loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires”, people who appear to have very little conscience about the effects of their products.
So I leave you with a question: if you use AI, what’s the line between pride in your work and getting it done fast or efficiently or cheaply? That’s the question we all need to be confronting now as we consider whether we want a world in which Paul Simon’s dry wind sweeps across the desert, bringing “dead sand falling on the children”. Because that is at least one way in which this huge social change could go.
Main picture: Kurt Cotoaga, Unsplash
RECOMMENDED READING
This post is more personal that most, so I didn’t burden it with background reading. But social disruption is on my mind because of two things I read this week.
First is an essay by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates: The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical. The summary at the top says: “The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. Right now, we are not preparing adequately for that transition. If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off.” It takes a balanced view of both the benefits and harms of generative AI. Worth a read if only because it is the view of someone who was a consequential part of the digital revolution. (Note: it opens with a striking yet slightly irritating graphic; scroll down to get to the meat of the thing.)
Second is a piece by AI engineer Matt Shumer, covering the recent Hugging Face hack in which an OpenAI model broke out of its sandbox and hacked another site: We Finally Know What Happened in the Hugging Face Hack, And It’s Wilder Than Anyone Thought. It’s not too technical, fascinating and an indication of what these tools are now capable of.
Previous Sensible Guide articles
What about the young people in the age of GenAI? – What should employers be doing about the young people they hire in the age of generative AI?
AI and humanity – a mission statement – I’ve been thinking about AI and humanity for a while. Here are three things I think about how we humans can use AI to enhance our lives.
If any of this is relevant to your work…
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