With every other tech product being released having the phrase “AI” rammed into it in ever more desperate fashion, it’s clear that we’re at the start of yet another tech goldrush, with every crypto grifter pivoting their crypto scam to an AI scam (and by pivoting I mean adding “AI” to the title.)
AI as it’s applied to isn’t really the right term for what we have now, it’s very advanced machine learning, or if you want to be really cruel, pattern recognition. If I were explaining it to my Mum I’d say it was a million monkeys with typewriters (or paint brushes) creating a million pages of text and then comparing them all to something Shakespeare wrote and picking the one that looks most like his stuff. Very crude I know, but because of Marketing we call it AI.
The promise of real AI, robots and automation is that humans won’t have to do dull jobs, or shitwork as it’s called sometimes. Even the systems we have right now can lighten the load on people. Things like Google’s Notebook LM can aid you greatly when conducting research, making summaries of documents for you, Github’s Copilot is a great tool for rubber ducking a problem or spotting daft bugs that you’ve created. Even some of the “deep fake” comedy TikToks are good.
The real creativity though when using these tools comes from the human behind the keyboard, the person creating the prompts that drive the tools, and we’re in real danger of executives and beancounters seeing this kind of thing and thinking that it can replace actual people.
The Screen Writers Guild of America went on strike over, among other things, the use of AI in scriptwriting as they feared they would be replaced, and it’s a very valid fear. There is room for AI in creative industries, but not at the expense of the creative people.
The rise of advertising as the main source of funding for newspapers has led to a situation where locl websites are literally unreadable, they’re plastered with adverts because revenue from them is now so low. A company that owns most of the local UK press recently published over 40 versions of the same article, most probably rewritten (or entirely written) by AI. There was probably some A/B testing going on and the “better” performing ones served more often, but still. It’s a growing problem that AI is trained on the content of the internet, but the content on the internet is increasingly generated by AI.
If the whole point of this article is to suggest that AI, robots and automation take take on all the shitwork, what impact is that going to have on society in general, the tax take of countries if nothing else is going to take a massive hit. If companies are not paying employees National Insurance because they have no employees. If you think tax dodging by corporations is bad now wait till they don’t have tax to dodge.
It also further funnels money into the pockets of the already very rich at the top of these companies, making the idea of “trickle down economics” even more ridiculous because how does the money trickle down any more?
An obvious solution is to tax the companies who employ more AI higher than those with less. Tax the use of AI in a way that reflects the fact it’s taken work from a human the same way import tariffs discourage egregious imports, where the use of AI is actually the right way to do it because it increases your productivity rather than reduce your wage bill then the higher rate of tax won’t matter. Use that tax revenue to retrain those who’s jobs have been lost to AI, or even better introduce Universal Basic Income from the increased tax take.
We’re in a period of growth in this sector at the moment. One day the bubble will burst and the videos of ex-presidents playing guitar will be the next generations dancing baby or flying toasters. We’re still at the point where we can influence the kind of society we want AI to provide and enable for us and that should be in the hands of a few rich assholes hiding behind free speech to let them make more billions.