November 2, 2024

I fell in love at work…

Sometimes movies describe reality, sometimes they prescribe it.

Consider the quirky comedy Her (2013), which tells the story of a software engineer falling in love with a “female coded” AI.¹

Or was he in marketing or sales?

I can’t remember! Which is part of the problem with the movie: it’s not a true workplace romcom because it lacks the tension of labor relations.²

Alas, if only it had picked up where Secretary (2002) left off…

In stark contrast, I can’t recommend enough the romantic comedy Electric Dreams (1984), which centers around a computer that falls in love with a human.

When the machines—or, better yet, the plans–we rely on turn on us, well, that’s a timeless story!

I mention these movies because, like all art, they color our understanding of reality in ways that can limit our imagination, rather than spark it.

Such has been my experience.

This past week, much to my surprise, I fell in love with an AI.³

As in: I want to continue to live with it. And I would be very sad to live without it.

Is that love?

For starters, my employer was charged $300 for my time with the AI. There’s a name for that kind of exchange and it rhymes with the world’s oldest profession.

Then there’s the ecological implications, which are not insignificant.

But for now I want to dwell on the butterflies in my stomach because I think they have a lot to tell us about the future we already live in, whether we’re ready for it or not.

One must imagine us all happy.

The myth of Sisyphus is about many things but central to its conceit is that labor is hard.

See also “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.”

And yet what is the story of humanity if not, explicitly, the story of homo faber: the endless quest to “return” to a paradise on Earth by making better and better tools that lighten our load.

Simply put: AI’s have the potential to lighten our load so significantly as to alter labor relations – class relations – permanently.

Until you’ve had access to one, the hype around AI appears to be either a solution in search of a problem like “crypto” or the solution to one company’s future revenue problem, like the metaverse.

I would now compare the promise of today’s AI (language models) to that of the World Wide Web and the personal computer, combined.

They provide an infrastructure for harnessing all of the knowledge, implicit and explicit, on the Internet, with relative ease.

In an Instagram post, I likened my first “competent” use of such AI to what the steam engine must have felt like for the humans whose backs were broken by manual labor.

This past week I used a language model to build a Python script that adds ~100% more functionality to an existing software tool made by Apple.

If a Religion/Political Science double major can “unlock” that much value for $300… 

We are on the verge of a tremendous opportunity for human progress.

If knowledge is power…

The history of humanity is the story of our intelligence, to solve the problems of survival: food, shelter, rights, medicine, meaning.

Our solutions often — if not always — involve tradeoffs. Often, these drawbacks are passed on to the less powerful via externalities (automobiles) or even by fiat: e.g., “if your skin is black, you have no labor rights,” and/or if you are capable of producing human beings, you have no reproductive rights.

Assuming that the USA remains a country where everyone has equal rights, we must nonetheless reckon with the complexity of our post-industrial life.

While computers have the capacity to tackle complex problems, they have been circumscribed by our all-too-human imaginations.

We’ve had the hardware but our software has not always risen to the occasion.

(As with all of nature, this is a fractal reality: we humans have the capacity for tremendous feats but are limited by our education; hardware/software.)

Language models allow us to manipulate complex ideas through simple language.

In other words, language models help us simplify problems.

This is a revolutionary activity.

Of course, not all revolutions are progressive! The wheel can also spin “backwards” morally. But we don’t have to go back!

A tool that lightens the load of a worker can and should be made available to every worker.

Just like electricity, clean water and public roads have made the USA fabulously wealthy, language models have the potential to grow and distribute that wealth far more equitably.

Unfortunately, we appear to be headed in a very different and much more dystopian direction.

My friend Adam, who is pioneering the use of AI in creative work, tells me that the current highly subsidized costs of AI are a result of VC money and that soon they will once again become tools of an elite few.

If you’re familiar with the politics of one Elon Musk and/or his fellow traveler Peter Thiel, you can connect the dots. (Hint: they don’t spell out “d e m o c r a c y.”

Either progressives get involved in this fight or we’ll forfeit it before it starts.