Much of the public response to language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has focused on all the jobs they appear poised to automate. But behind even the most impressive AI system are people — huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused. Only the companies that can afford to buy this data can compete, and those that get it are highly motivated to keep it secret. The result is that, with few exceptions, little is known about the information shaping these systems’ behavior, and even less is known about the people doing the shaping.
The anthropologist David Graeber defines “bullshit jobs” as employment without meaning or purpose, work that should be automated but for reasons of bureaucracy or status or inertia is not. These AI jobs are their bizarro twin: work that people want to automate, and often think is already automated, yet still requires a human stand-in. The jobs have a purpose; it’s just that workers often have no idea what it is.
You might miss this if you believe AI is a brilliant, thinking machine. But if you pull back the curtain even a little, it looks more familiar, the latest iteration of a particularly Silicon Valley division of labor, in which the futuristic gleam of new technologies hides a sprawling manufacturing apparatus and the people who make it run. Duhaime reached back farther for a comparison, a digital version of the transition from craftsmen to industrial manufacturing: coherent processes broken into tasks and arrayed along assembly lines with some steps done by machines and some by humans but none resembling what came before.
Worries about AI-driven disruption are often countered with the argument that AI automates tasks, not jobs, and that these tasks will be the dull ones, leaving people to pursue more fulfilling and human work. But just as likely, the rise of AI will look like past labor-saving technologies, maybe like the telephone or typewriter, which vanquished the drudgery of message delivering and handwriting but generated so much new correspondence, commerce, and paperwork that new offices staffed by new types of workers — clerks, accountants, typists — were required to manage it. When AI comes for your job, you may not lose it, but it might become more alien, more isolating, more tedious.
[link] [comments]