The Future of Work
Previously I glossed over the advent of AI and the Future of Work, highlighting points around disinformation and ethics. Version 4 of ChatGPT continues to upend the Future of Work as pundits weigh in on what the implications of this technology are for younger, less experienced white-collar workers.
As this technology becomes less fringe and more prevalent, it raises concerns about the role of humans, the implications of how we work and what we work on.
Whilst history doesn’t repeat itself, it often rhymes.
Before the advent of the car, horse riding was a skill utilized for the transportation of goods. As a result of horse riding, blacksmithing was a vibrant industry that required the use of iron as a material for horseshoes. Now that we have cars, riding horses has been relegated to being an expensive hobby that is televised and has a base of high-net-worth individuals which financially back it.
Show jumping, very posh.
In a society that values economic productivity, how at risk are people’s salaries if ChatGPT vastly increases someone’s productivity and output?
The common theme amongst knowledge workers like copywriters is that instead of writing, they’ve turned their attention to editing. The Orwell Foundation has a well written and insightful piece which elaborates on this by taking on angles related to intellectual individualism and freedom of thought:
“It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for instance, are produced by what is essentially a factory process, the work being done partly mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their individual style. Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors. So also with the innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government departments. Even more machine-like is the production of short stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap magazines. Papers such as the Writer abound with advertisements of literary schools, all of them offering you ready-made plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct plots for yourself.”
The TL;DR on this is rather bleak: the end of creativity as we know it. In the real world today, businesses have cut the numbers of writers whilst keeping the salaries of employed staff the same. It is ironic too, that this article laments the death of creativity and original thought when the data set that AI is learning from is based on what stories the media has had us regurgitating for the past two decades.
How do we win?
Technology achieves its potential when it is powered by an understanding of humans. When we instruct an AI tool correctly, we have something which is unencumbered by human hurdles like energy, our limited frontiers of knowledge and social pressure. The key then, is having the skills, knowledge, historical basis, and ability to curate in order to know what to ask the AI to do. If you’re looking for writing which is going to date badly in the “AI era”, I highly recommend the New Yorker article on “The End of the English Major.” (Disclaimer: I am an English Major)
The advent of prompt-driven LLMs like ChatGPT means that natural language is now a programming language.
For example, In your prompt if you:
- Limit the knowledge ChatGPT has access to;
- Prioritize the knowledge ChatGPT has access to;
- Ask for content to be written in a specific voice (eg. New York Times, Washington Post);
You can improve the quality of the output. And now that you can (through the API) add more info to language models, you could impose your own voice on top of the model to produce similar sounding content drafts. As with all AI, however, by researching and fudging a perspective, it is averaging out all the dross on the internet; though it will have trawled the occasional Pulitzer Prize winner, the high proportion of bad writing it will have also ingested will bring down the quality considerably.
This modus operandi employed by LLMs where bogus information is created in the absence of real data means that the role of humans lies more in the validation of data as trust is at a minimum.
It's not just the writers and creativity that is in jeopardy, Ben Hunt (@epsilontheory) argues that the jobs of analysts, associates and juniors in knowledge industries like consultancies and law firms are in jeopardy too:
In “the past” junior employees of firms like KPMG would spend all day working on a financial model only to hand it to the partner for review and be embarrassed/impressed when they instantly zeroed in on the number that was wrong. It’s in this review process that deep learning and experience occurs. Without this, within a generation, we won’t understand enough about how things work to innovate on them. We’ll just be users.
On the bright side, armed with AI shortcuts, some of the highest paid roles i.e. finance, tech roles (modelling & programming skillset) should become more accessible to previously disadvantaged people. However, the institutional intention needs to be there for this to happen and that is ALL about leadership & vision. I hope that the "AI age" is good for democracy. Why? Because we need human intelligence and community to work together for the best intentions and outcomes for society. Like what happened to democratic participation & emancipation in the last industrial revolution, I would hope this shakes us out of our democratic malaise and complacency into more active participation.
So where does that leave us?
Like the riders before us, some of us will have the luxury of continuing to ride. This writer’s voice is not being replaced by a computer any time soon, although the jury is still out on GraemeAI™ videos! We would do well, however, to imagine and plan for a future in which we do less of the mundane creation and more of the valuable curation of our work.
