General purpose technology

Where we are going (soon)

Its strange to think that there might have been people mad about electrification. Would they have said candlelight is better than the ugly glowing electric lights?

“A street full of electric light is a sign of civic failure and is an insulting injury to the soul. Shutting out the night is as disastrous as shutting out the light.”?

Said Michael Leunig writing for the Sydney Morning Herald in 2009. But that is a modern view looking back after a century in which we became used to the electric light bulb.

But there were certainly people mad about weaving machines. Aristotle wrote (a bit paraphrased):

when looms weave by themselves man' s slavery will end

And yet when that day came, the skilled weavers of Nottingham, England rose up to destroy the steam powered weaving machines. The movement spread to the North West and Yorkshire between 1811 and 1816 and the industrialists took to shooting protesters. Eventually the movement was suppressed with legal and military force, which included execution and penal transportation of accused and convicted Luddites.

Introducing something new causes a re-valuation. Objects, activities, outputs that we valued highly before are suddenly less valuable or not valuable at all. New things which hadn’t been valued or even known before suddenly replace them as the highly valued things.

This is naturally disruptive to society, organizations, and individuals since we organize ourselves around that which is valued. The expert weaver, renowned in his or her community for a skill, can no longer feed the family after that skill has been replaced by machines. The debate over whether more jobs are created overall in an economy due to the introduction of a new technology is irrelevant to the plight of the income earner whose livelihood has been rapidly eliminated.

And so we are here at the dawn of a new general purpose technology which will drive a re-valuation process whether we like it or not. Many will not, as the skills they had been paid for and had worked hard to develop will no longer have a value in the post generative AI / foundation model economy. And the institutions (such as education) will be turned upside down by the re-valuation process. So these people will spend their time in denial, will argue against these new tools, and will try to prove the inferiority of this new technology which kicks their cherished things to the curb.

This is of course irrational and will not result in the outcome which they fervently wish for — a return to a world in which the infernal machine does not disrupt their livelihood or eradicate the value of their vocation.?But we should anticipate the resistance and be ready with the antidote:

1. Information -- the challenge is in misinformation (and misunderstanding) that is so easily believed and repeated by people who have a bias against the technology. A reasonable challenge is that, whether OpenAI or Google or any of the others, there are easily identifiable problems with the way these technologies work today. Images of hands with six fingers, bodies with three legs, and articles that reference sources that don't exist... Whether you call it confabulation or hallucination or lying, there is a known engineering challenge in using these system to produce accurate results. But rather than say that AI cannot be trusted or used, people should understand how to safely use the existing models, how to get the best results (and guard against error). And then also to understand how rapidly the tools are improving -- GPT-4 is much better than GPT-3 for example. Google's Gemini will be even better (according to Deepmind's CEO...) Basing your evaluation of this rapidly evolving technology on the current state would be a huge error. The first weaving machines produced inferior output and then rapidly superior output to that of human weavers.
2. Reconfiguration -- we have a lot of hard work to do in rethinking how our institutions, systems, and processes should work in a post-AI world. Will the occupation of "artist" be eliminated? No! But will the definition and activity of an artist change? Yes! We will re-value the mechanical activity of pushing a pencil across a page or smearing pigmented grease across a canvas. But vision, creativity, imagination, the intellectual process of finding a novel expression for an emotion, experience, or idea... the aspiration and agency of the artist will become even more valued. In education we will need more discussion and critical thinking and less essay writing. At work we will need insight and collaboration and not busy work.
3. Adaptability -- each one of us has a personal challenge. How will we change ourselves, how will we adapt our behaviors and activities to the new world in which AI will be an ever-present facilitator, companion, collaborator... How will we think and work differently. How will we change our aspirations, our ambitions for what we can achieve and create. How will we adapt?

This is the near term challenge, the antidote to the destructive thought pattern of AI as a threat or danger. Arm yourself with information, throw yourself into the work of reconfiguration, and adapt.