For The Borg, by The Borg
This AI stuff is getting out of (the human) hand.
There’s an IKEA commercial from last year that centers on a robot trying to “save the world.” Presumably set in the hyper-polluted future (a couple decades before Wall-E), the commercial shows the robot in a number of Sisyphean situations: picking up random litter, attempting to stop a polluting truck, cleaning an oil-saturated beach. Near the end of the video, the robot slinks home, crying digital tears, clearly frustrated by its inability to save the world. The robot’s spirits improve when it enters its IKEA-furnished home, where its robot spouse and robot children are engaged in a bunch of things to “change a bit for good” (that being the name of the ad campaign). The cheery robot family makes bulk meals stored in reusable IKEA containers, plants plants in IKEA planters, and recycles stuff. These robots teach the viewer that the outside world might be a mess, but we can all take small steps at home to “change a bit for good” and feel better about the climate apocalypse that’ll kill most life on earth.
This morning, I ran across a story in The Hustle about a Hong Kong gaming company, the awesomely-named NetDragon Websoft, who installed an AI CEO last August. Tang Yu, as the AI CEO is called, “worked 24/7, didn’t sleep, and was compensated $0 per year.” Since Yu’s appointment, “the company has outperformed Hong Kong’s stock market,” according to the article.
The Hustle article also mentions McKinsey research projecting “that 45m workers, or ~28% of the entire American workforce, would lose their jobs to automation by 2030.” For those with poor arithmetic skills, that’s seven years from now. And while a lot of focus has been on AI replacing low-skill and task oriented jobs, the AI CEO suggests there’s potential for AI to replace even the highest human rungs of the corporate ladder.
Whether replacing grunt workers or executives, AI promises to significantly decrease the financial and human costs of doing business. However, eliminating or downgrading the employment of 28 percent of the workforce (that’s just the U.S.!) will significantly reduce the number of customers for those businesses. No employment, no money, no consumer base, no market, no business. Which is why the IKEA commercial is so prescient: AI-powered, automated businesses can sell stuff to robots!
At the risk of overusing the word “dystopia,” this is some dystopian shit. The only parties who could view any of this as positive are those profiting from businesses without any actual functional role in those businesses, namely stock holders and other types of investors. Everyone else is on-edge.
The colloquial definition of Luddite is someone who is anti-technology, but that is not an accurate definition of the movement, which “protested against manufacturers who used machines in what they called ‘a fraudulent and deceitful manner’ to get around standard labor practices,” per Wikipedia. And a fully automated product delivery system is the logical endgame for a globalize commercial megaplex that’s continually defrauding and deceiving workers, reducing pay and jobs, sidestepping humanitarian and environmental oversight, all in the name of higher margins and profits.
Similar to yesterday’s post about the anti-human, anti-environment way America has been designed, this post will not provide an easy way out, other than to say it’s never been a better time to cherish and retain one’s humanity —to do things that defy logic, practicality, and productivity, to do things manually, in-person.
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