While the crowd at sxsw2024 booing a sizzle reel of people either promising the beauty of the future “AI” will bring or claiming it to be “without alternative” is funny and went viral for all the right reasons, this event speaks to a deeper shift in perception.
As Brian Merchant writes:
For the buzziest tech of the moment to get shouted down at SXSW speaks volumes about the scale and nature of the animosity generative AI has amassed. The tech is seen, here, as exploitative by tastemakers and by technologists.
But I’d go further: It’s not just the public perception that OpenAI has been trying to plant in our collective understanding is falling apart due to the actions of that strange company, I think the actual narrative of “AI” is untangling.
In a perfect world, AI would be a supplementary tool that allows small-time players to participate in their field at similar levels to the corporations.
In the current world, AI is coming for EVERY job, eventually. You would think that means nobody has to work, but it will most likely mean nobody is ALLOWED to work.
Yeah, ideally we’d focus on automating the annoying jobs so goods can be provided extremely inexpensively. For example, automated farming and run it at cost. I would love to see non-profits operating conventional food production with the goal of reducing total cost (and perhaps providing food for free), but that’s not likely to happen. Instead, we’ll see companies like John Deere further limit what farmers can do with their own equipment to the point where Deere essentially ends up profiting from whatever savings there is in automation.
We could have essentially free food, but instead we’re going after creative jobs like software development and art.
We could reduce the cost of software and art, but we won’t. The money will go to the executives that saved all that money on sallaries.
But my question is, do we want to?
If we go on the assumption that no work is necessary, which work would people prefer to do? I’m guessing software and art is pretty high on that list, whereas septic pumping and large scale farming are pretty low, yet the focus is on the former rather than the latter, probably because of labor costs.
