Lots of the science fiction of my childhood has now become reality. I remember when the idea of a computer that could speak with you was only in the movies and TV shows. I saw the movie in the theater when the time traveling Scotty from Star Trek picked up a mouse and said, “hello computer” and referred to the keyboard as quaint. I watched the scene from the first Alien movie where the captain speaks to “mother” and uses a DOS command prompt like interface.
Now, I regularly ask Alexa for the temperature, the time, and sometimes for measurements of the sun (the last part mainly to satisfy my son’s curiosity). Unlike me, my son has grown up in a world where AI is at his fingertips. When he is my age, what will make the Alexa in my home seem like the clunky command prompt driven computer from the movie Alien?
While AI has made leaps and bounds from the early days from the clunky chatbots that were like versions of “mother” except they couldn’t pass the Turing test, it still had some ways to go. I know for a lot of creators, AI is a mixed bag. I can also see why visual artists are the most at threat with generative AI.
When it comes to creating pictures, it’s really good. It’s not perfect and has produced some pretty horrifying images like people with too many teeth, or motivational posters with HR Giger imagery, but there are also a lot of AI created art that looks really good, and even downright stunning in some cases.
For someone like myself with zero artistic ability and cannot create a stick figure without it looking bad, there is a part of me that is excited by the idea that I can click a button, and get a cool looking spaceship. As a writer, who writes fictitious stories, there is another part of me who is horrified.
Generative AI threatens the livelihood of artists who through years of hard work, can draw cool spaceships, and sell those spaceships as cover art for sci fi novels, game art, and all the other ways a person makes a living selling their cool spaceship drawings. In addition, the AI used all sorts of art created by humans in order to draw that spaceship, and even though the humans artwork was used to train the AI, their work is largely uncompensated.
The criticisms of AI are that the people who had a job doing something creative won’t have one, and their work that was used to train the AI to do their job was also uncompensated. Conversely, we now have custom artwork available to everyone at the click of a button. I think the real question now is not whether we can roll back the clock and make generative AI disappear, but what to do about it now that it’s here.
We could compensate the artists whose work was used to train the AI, but that would very quickly put the AI manufacturers out of business. The datasets to train AI are so vast that any amount of money that wouldn’t feel like a slap in the face to the artist would be more than the data is worth. And perhaps, that’s the goal, making training AI so difficult because you have to pay or get permission for everything fed into the machine, that we eliminate its use.
However, I personally don’t know if stifling technology is the way to go. Sure, it may help some folks in the short term who are losing business to AI or help future would be artists have a career in art, because let’s face it, an artist hitting the scene today has the odds stacked against them. However, is the pain because we are losing artists? Or is it because we as a society don’t have a good system in place for people who are displaced by technology?
If we are worried that people will stop drawing because AI is in the game, I don’t know if that will happen. Most of us buy mass produced clothing, yet there are still some people that sew their own. There are archery stores, yet at the last renaissance festival I saw a guy hand fletching arrows and selling them. The point is that there is a market for handcrafted, human made items, and perhaps the purveyor of cool spaceships will need to time lapse themselves drawing the piece to prove it was “human made”.
Leaving the artist/AI debate alone for a moment, do we really have a good social structure in place for people whose career becomes obsolete by technology? Let’s take the self-driving car for instance. While it’s a more complicated piece of AI then one that generates cool spaceships, its consequences of failure are more than just spooky pictures, and if it becomes widespread, its implications are more than just out of work artists.
Take the long-haul trucking industry as an example. While people may not step into a taxi cab with no driver (or take a lot of convincing to get in that vehicle), a business owner, who wants to ship goods from a warehouse in Ohio to their store in Washington, may not care if a human transports the goods so long as they are intact and on time. The widespread use of self-driving vehicles is the end of long-haul trucking as we know it.
When a business owner decides how to ship their goods from Point A to Point B, they are going to go with the cheapest option. A truck without a human at the wheel (assuming the technology works, is safe, etc.), will be the cheapest option. Not only that but it will be the quickest, the AI trucks won’t need sleep or breaks. We may even see fuel improvements like electric vehicles with photovoltaic paint that charges during the day so it can run the batteries all night.
Human truck drivers just can’t compete when AI is ready to hit the road. But the decimation of jobs doesn’t end there. Think about all the hotels, truck stops, and businesses that litter the American freeway. Drive down any interstate in the US, and you’ll see a slew of businesses that are all aimed at the person passing through town.
Sure, there are road trips, vacations, and holiday weekends that sustain these businesses, but the long-haul trucker is the stable regular customer that truck stops can rely on during the lean times when it’s not a big holiday weekend, or there aren’t a whole lot of travel plans. Take away the truckers, and hotels, fast food, travel stops, and lots of highway businesses go away. Sure, there are already truckers who sleep in their trucks, buy groceries for their haul, and minimize their expenses, but eliminate even a fraction of a customer base in an industry where margins are thin, and it will start to disappear.
So that’s why I ask again, is the problem AI, or how people are treated if they don’t have a job? Would it be so bad if society took care of someone who just enjoys creating art but can’t make any money off it? What about the long-haul trucker who can’t compete with AI trucks, or the hotel workers or fast-food employees that are out of jobs, when people can just hop in their car, program their destination, and take a nap for the ride?
While I understand that no one likes a freeloader, how irritating is it to do all the work while your coworker plays a game on their phone, and both of you collect the same paycheck by the end of the week? But what if we didn’t consider a person out of a job as a freeloader, but as another human being who deserves a certain minimum standard of living? What if instead of giving everyone the same paycheck regardless of effort, we guarantee there is a standard of living everyone should have, and they have to work if they want anything more?
In my book, The Robin Hood of Couches, I tease out this idea, where each human is given 10 foot by 10 foot accommodations (with basics like a bed, phone, etc.), a free clothing and grocery store, free city transportation, healthcare, online education, and internet, and that’s it. So, if the artist wants to live in a 10 foot by 10 foot cube and make art, they aren’t going to starve, live in a tent, or any of the other tragic circumstances not having a job can lead to.
However, I don’t throw out capitalism entirely. Because money still exists, it just goes to people who work, and if they work hard, they can get a three-bedroom house, take vacations, shop at stores that aren’t free, and use their money to buy cars. There still is labor for retail, and coffee shops that staff via gig economy apps, except these people aren’t forced to work to survive, they’re doing it for getting that big screen TV, or new gaming system, or whatever they want that money can buy. Basically, I propose a minimum standard of living, and let people work for whatever they want beyond that.
While my system in the book may not work and isn’t perfect, it is a different way for us to think about unemployment, and I do think that we need to rethink as a society that work equals your ability to survive. Typically, in the past, new technology meant new jobs. Think about the horse and carriage drivers in the merry ol’ days of yore. The car came around and decimated their industry. Not only did the carriage drivers lose their jobs, all the people hired to maintain the horses also had trouble finding work because stable mucking was on a decline.
Sure, there are some horse and carriage drivers still around for tourists in New York, but most people take rideshares, taxis, or subways to get to where they are going. Cars eliminated the horse and carriage industry, and all the people who supported it. However, the vehicle created taxi drivers, auto mechanics, and other jobs. The point is that we never really had to think about unemployed people all that much as a society because there were always jobs when technology made them go away.
However, with AI, I don’t know if that’s true. Sure, there are new jobs like Prompt Engineer that didn’t exist before AI became ubiquitous, but the new jobs are often highly specialized and really only a benefit to the highly skilled people who can do them. However, for all the truck drivers, customer service reps, and jobs that don’t require a high level of mastery to enter the profession, there is a good chance AI will eliminate their job, and it will never come back. What’s worse is that there probably won’t be jobs for those people and no alternative as AI starts taking over industries like it could for long haul trucking and already doing for graphic designers and artists.
We’ve had to deal with jobpocalypses like the Great Depression where there were less jobs than people who could work them, but there was a path forward, a route to there’s enough jobs for everyone and low unemployment. However, the better AI gets at doing what humans do, the more jobs, and industries will be like the horse and carriage driver of today, something that we do for amusement rather than work. I can see a drive a big rig theme park. And the less likely we will have suitable replacement jobs (ie a person switching from mucking stables to doing oil changes).
The real question is not whether we are going to stop AI from taking jobs (even if we did require companies to pay for art they used in training, they will switch their model to public domain art and volunteers), but what are we going to do with all the people who lose them to AI?
I think the question that should guide our thinking about what to do in the tide of AI rests in what we do with someone who is unemployed. Is there a minimum standard of living that all humans should have by virtue of being born? While I don’t think that I have the answers because I’m just a writer postulating what ifs, I do think it’s an important question we’ve ignored for too long, and AI is making it all the more pressing that we answer that question and have policies in place to ensure that minimum standard of living regardless of person’s individual circumstance.
Gets down from my horse.
Time Burrito 