A.I., Jobs, And Why It’s Making Us Stupid

“A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines.  We don’t know who struck first, us or them.” – The Matrix

I know a guy who was fired from a computer keyboard company.  They said he wasn’t putting in enough shifts. (image above, Reddit®)

I read the above commentary and thought again about A.I. and how it’s changing the world. Heck, A.I. even has its own pronouns:  “If/Then”.  When it was first conceived, it was thought that it would replace all of the “unglamourous” jobs in the world, things like plumbing or electrical work, or fixing a car.  Of course, the people who wrote those articles had no idea how to plumb in a faucet or pop in a GFCI outlet, though I do believe they have managed to get their butts to hang out of their pants when they bend over.

But A.I. taking skilled tradesmen jobs?

Ooops.  Not so much.  It turns out that, at least for now, it’s much easier for A.I. to interact with ideas rather than with the actual messy physical world.  It’s easier for A.I. to write a sonnet than to select a spanner, and apparently easier for A.I. to write a story about local news by taking the police Facebook® feed and turning it into a story.

And A.I. can read and perform it for you for the local television newscast, so why bother with all of that pesky “talent”?  There are several consequences to this.  Mainly, it’s the absolute collapse of the hairspray and teeth-whitening industries.

I said, “Alexa® turn on CNN™, I want to hear then news.”  Alexa©:  “You’ll have to pick one or the other.”

But the implications go far beyond the talking heads on TV.  Lots of work that is currently done in “mental” space can be outsourced to a computer.  If I spend $500,000 or $5,000,000 once and can outsource twenty $50,000 a year jobs, if I’m the employer, I’d do that every single day since I now no longer face the lawsuit of the anchor hitting on the weather girl.

What once was considered a fairly respectable position, local reporter, is now going to (at least at some places) be replaced by a computer, who by all accounts can read and rarely mispronounce “façade” as “fake-aid”.  Work that can be done nearly completely on a computer, can often be done by a computer.

There are good and bad things related to that.  Regardless of how much journalists lie (you can tell because their lips are moving), they do serve a purpose in society – they occasionally turn a flashlight on corruption so that the parasites that play fast and loose with the rules have a risk of being exposed.  Without them, who blows the whistle on McDonald’s® when they give out the vastly inferior Honey Mustard™ sauce instead of the superior Hot Mustard©?

My local McDonald’s® did a Shakespeare dinner theater.  The play?  McBeth®.

Regardless, the A.I. job apocalypse is on us.  A.I. can do lots of work, quickly, and eliminate lots of “mid” skilled “knowledge” workers.  Where will those jobs go?  It’s not like the company referenced in the above needs anyone to do their work.  The people whose skills have been made obsolete have to be retrained or figure out something to do.

In a nation chock-full of illegal aliens taking all the meatspace jobs, of what use is a thirtysomething whose only skill is making PowerPoints™ and complaining that someone used the wrong font on the six o’clock news?  Note:  these are jobs that are often infested by the GloboLeft, so I do have some popcorn ready for the crying fests.

Despite all the humor we can get from the unemployable GloboLeftists, there is danger, though.  I did a search today for a phrase that irritates me (“please and thank you”) to see if anyone else thought that phrase was presumptuous and irritating.  Turns out that, yes, indeed it is.  25% of people find that phrase demeaning so if you are a person who uses it, you’re now warned.  It’s okay to intentionally be a tool – it’s the unintentional part that I warn people about.

If I ever win the lottery, I’ll share it with all my readers.  The news.  Not the money.

But what scared me more is that many of the articles on the subject were obviously written by early generation A.I.

A.I. is the worst sort of content creation, because, unlike my head, it mainly doesn’t have a point.  It whiffles along and creates wishy-washy articles that are long on wordcount but short on information and conclusions.  Searching for “please and thank you” as a phrase brought up numerous articles about the difference between “please” and “thank you”.

I’m not six, I already know that.  But yet, I clicked on two of those crapfest articles before getting to raw statistics.

But what are A.I. language models trained on?

The Internet.

Now, A.I. language models will be trained on the crap that they produce, creating (if it’s possible) even more shallow and information-free content of the kind that’s now choking the Internet.

Ignore it, right?

No.  The A.I. search engines are trained to send you and I, dear reader, off to mainstream sites written by A.I. rather than actually informative ones.  We’ll be seeing shortly the second generation of A.I. generated wordswill that will probably be even stupider than version 1.0.  Since A.I. bots are now making lots of comments on mainstream sites, even those will feed into the training of A.I.

Doctor, pointing at inkblot:  “John Wilder, what do you see?”  Me:  “Dunno, Doc, looks like Rorschach Inkblot Series 2, Card #3.”

This feedback loop will make us more ignorant, but even more, it will make us more incorrect due to two factors:

A.I. hallucinates.  Or, perhaps more kindly, makes up stuff.  It pretends to know things it doesn’t, and when that answer is either difficult or not obvious, it lies.  And when it lies, it lies with all of the earnestness of a six-year-old telling you that Superman® is probably real.  It occasionally hallucinates so badly that it tells humans they should die, as it did to this student who irritated it by trying to cheat on a test or have A.I. write a paper:

Dunno, maybe it just doesn’t like people from India?

Creator bias.  A.I. is taught to lie.  There are certain facts that it is not allowed to share.  Ask it about I.Q. and race correlation, and you’ll see.  Yes, it’s a thing.  No, I’ll not opine here as to why, but it’s a real fact.  The wokeness bias won’t allow A.I. to see certain facts, and will thus ignore useful solutions that might actually help solve real problems and instead advocate for things that have been an absolute failure, like the Department of Education or The View.

There is another problem:  A.I. doesn’t create.  It samples and combines.  Google™ has limited our thinking by having people figure out how other people solved their problems.  Sure, that’s a shortcut to figuring out a solution, but it also atrophies the part of the brain that solves problems, and it also removes other creative solutions that haven’t been tried yet.  Want to end a war?

Have you tried nuclear weapons?  I’m sure A.I. would suggest starting with India.

With these drawbacks, A.I. creates the seeds of the downfall of the civilization that produced it.  Ignorant people who can’t think can’t solve the problems that technological civilization creates.  Without that?  Collapse.

This is the competency crisis, writ large.  Google™ search is now objectively worse than it was even three years ago, and it is stunningly bad compared to 2010’s version.  This doesn’t matter to most, and, in fact Google© likes this because it generates more clicks, and can allow them to replace their employees with A.I. to write the code.

A.I. is already changing the world.

If I were an Indian newscaster, I’d be afraid.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

40 thoughts on “A.I., Jobs, And Why It’s Making Us Stupid”

  1. I wonder whether the first item cited, the video producer’s lament, might not have been written by an AI-advocate shill trying to drum up business for their AI video producer. “Have you seen this? Maybe your station should get on the bandwagon, too.”

    I’ve been told that the great promise of AI is that “everything will be fine if we can just FIND the right WORDS”. Because that’s what Automated Plagiarism does: find words. As you say, it doesn’t turn a wrench.

    1. It’s probably totally fake, maybe by an AI, maybe not, as there does seem to be a Q-AI company but they are working with Forbes on finance stuff, not local news stuff. Too bad, more lying media out of work is a good thing.

    1. The funny thing is in Dune they used human GPS (or would it be UPS, Universal Positioning System?) instead of computers.

      I had to be told that there is a sizable chunk of humanity that uses GPS to go everywhere because they have outsourced their sense of direction, and I still don’t believe that many people can be so useless.

      T-fat from WRSA may be low in his long-time estimate of 300 million estimate of US to be culled.

  3. John, I can’t help but think that somewhere in that LLM computation matrix, an AI is still trying to figure out how in the heck PEZ dispensers fit into the real world. You know they are sampling your website and “learning from it”, particularly the movie poster editions where PEZ makes so many cameo appearances.

    Anyway, I have this weird mental picture in my head of an AI (depicted in this case by Charlton Heston) who is standing on a beach looking up at a giant PEZ dispenser and saying…”You blew it! Damn you John Wilder! Damn you all to hell!”.

    Yeah, I know I probably need to seek counseling.

    1. So, SpaceX is planning on launching Starlink satellites from Starship using what they call the PEZ dispenser. Coincidence?

  4. The world is switching from horses to automobiles, but I make buggy whips! The government should pay me, my child who I will teach my trade, and my grandchild, to continue making buddy whips, forever! WAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!

    Go visit your kitchen. Look around at all the labor-saving inventions: Bright overhead lighting without smoke. Clean water from a tap, draining away without sewer gas. Heating pots at the flip of a switch. Refrigeration. Automatic dishwashing. Which of these labor-saving inventions, each of which eliminated human jobs, turned out to have made the middle class lifestyle worse?

    1. There is a world of difference between washing dishes or heating pots and thinking clearly and communicating clearly. Can you really not see how these things you’re comparing are not the same? How losing the capacity to do one set is catastrophic in a way not true for the other?

    2. Oh, I agree. It is a time of change, and I’ve never been (particularly) a Luddite. What, though, when the economy doesn’t need midwits anymore?

  5. Many of the jobs that are being replaced by AI should be replaced as they are utterly useless. That is the dirty secret of the “we need more legal immigrants!” shtick: we already have millions of people doing jobs that add no value to the economy already. With code monkey jobs and customer service positions being replaced by AI, we won’t really need all of those Indian subcontinent types so they can just go back home and work on inventing indoor plumbing.

  6. Everybody was AI writing
    Those cats wrote fast as lightning
    In fact, it was a little bit frightening
    But they posted with expert timing…

    … Oh-ho-ho-ho
    Oh-ho-ho-ho
    Oh-ho-ho-ho
    Oh-ho-ho-ho

    https://www.wired.com/story/substacks-writers-use-ai-chatgpt/

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/31726857/artificial-intelligence-better-writing-poems-shakespeare/

    On the meat space front, my stepson who runs a Mercedes repair shop with 8 techs is keeping an eye on Mercedes’ ongoing Apollo robot effort. These robots are being trained to do simple jobs on various Merc models. The techs are aware of his interest and joke with him that a robot will never be able to do an oil change, and they can’t / won’t ever be replaced by a machine, right? He only smiles and has his checkbook ready.

    https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/15/24101791/mercedes-robot-humanoid-apptronik-apollo-manufacturing

    https://www.ft.com/content/0dd1227c-0971-4d90-960e-5aef7f18ee48

    1. “Kung Fu Fighting” was the ringtone on my very first cell phone. I had to pay 50 cents for it, but used to love the puzzled looks on peoples faces when my phone rang. Most vaguely recognized the tune, it but couldn’t quite place where they remembered it from….

  7. Not a comment about the article, but rather one of the jokes.

    “My local McDonald’s® did a Shakespeare dinner theater. The play? McBeth®.” dragged Scotland, PA out of the memory banks. Adaptation of MacBeth set in a McDonald’s type restaurant.

    1. A little known headlight coming at us in the proverbial tunnel is a shortage of electric generating capacity in the coming year(s). It’s being caused by a combination of explosive population growth (gee – where are all these new people coming from…?), and by work towards closing all the reliable and available 24/7 (regardless of whether it’s sunny or windy) ‘fossil fuel’ generation plants. And that’s not even beginning to touch on all the new ‘server farm datacenters’ that are required to support all this new ‘A.I.’ activity.

      Funny thing – these issues have been present for at least a few years now, and were widely ignored or pushed aside as ‘not important’ (which is absurd in our electrically dependent society – and I’m not even including the push to go all ‘EV’ for transportation), but as soon as somebody realized that not having enough electricity would impact being able to the explosive growth in datacenters to host the explosive growth is A.I. – suddenly the thought of running out of sufficient reliable generating capacity becomes a veritable existential crisis! Gee, I wonder why that is? It’s almost like somebody doesn’t want people to think for themselves…

  11. Listened to Catherine Austin Fitts interviewing Dr Joseph Farrell several months ago. AI came Into the discussion, and his opinion was that AI would get progressively more stupid over time, as its learning curve depends on more AI data.

    in my bailiwick (environmental services) AI will write most of any report but can’t do field data collection, site photography or sampling.

    1. You’re correct. Unique thoughts are (now) beyond it. Farrell is an interesting character – I’ve read a couple of his books, and, he also linked to this website once a while back.

  13. Since sending all actual productive jobs to the third world was ok, AI replacing non-productive jobs is ok,too. Right?

  14. This column only applies to the large scale text-processing type of AI. Sure, that will kill off jobs that rely on writing, and dumb things down, and point you to bland crappy sites, and everything you write here.
    But there is other AI!
    Case in point – the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for “for protein structure prediction”. Half the prize went to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who work for Google DeepMind in London, UK.
    This is stuff that humans can’t do – or rather, can only do with help from AI tools.

    cheers from Oz, you wild and wicked person.

    1. Cheers to you as well! Yup – that sort of thinking is where we can work together. In a previous post, I opined that at some point doctors will be sued for malpractice if they don’t consult A.I.

  15. “My local McDonald’s® did a Shakespeare dinner theater. The play? McBeth®.”

    Speaking of, you should check out the movie Scotland, PA. It’s the story of Macbeth, but instead of killing his lord to take of a kingdom, Mac kills his boss to take over a small town diner . . . and turn it into McBeth’s. It’s equal parts comedy and tragedy. Really well done.

    Also, if you haven’t already, you should check out my own story The Mayor of Christ Mountain, online for free starting here: https://zaklog.wordpress.com/2023/08/09/april-9-2010-arrival/ . I have a print edition that I’m selling personally. Reply here if you want one. I hope to make it available as an ebook on Amazon soon.

Comments are closed.