A reader asks: Is AI ruining everything?

A reader asks: Is AI ruining everything?

Archer replies: Not that long ago it was like AI had lost its keys and someone had to tell it they were still in the door. Now it’s destroying the world again, wiping out jobs, cheating on its taxes. Next thing you know it will go all-in grifter, starting a SPAC or launching a meme coin. (Whoops, sorry, that’s fils Trump.)

There was a time when smashing a printing press was considered a useful act of economic rebellion. But that turned out to be mostly a waste of energy and less than salubrious for the participants, many of whom were executed or exiled. Poor little Ned Ludd was sent away, destined to live forever as a cautionary tale in the bedtime stories of venture capitalists.

More to the point, the printing press was found to be a pretty handy thing to have, though to be fair it has helped foment the occasional revolution – some good (Thomas Payne, Common Sense), some less good (Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto).

Hard to know how things will work out in the moment. As Werner Von Braun once (maybe) said, “When the rockets go up, that’s science. Where they come down, that’s politics.”

One thing is true: technology forecasters are neck and neck with economists for congenitally poor prognosticating. For both, disaster is always just over the horizon.

James Cameron, he of Titanic fame (pun intended), has suggested that a “Terminator-Style Apocalypse” is possible if AI is weaponized. Sounds very cinematic. Elon Musk, who says a lot of things, is on record remarking that AI is “a significant existential threat” with a 10-20% chance that it “goes bad.”

Less apocalyptic (so far) but of more immediate concern is the impact of AI on jobs. Here, even The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan has noticed, bringing her patented middle brow alarmism to bear on the topic in a recent column. As Noonan observed, this time around it’s the theory class that’s at risk – lawyers, accountants, economists, and so on. Possibly their portfolios will keep them afloat, as AI-driven increases in productivity pushes stock prices ever higher. Or possibly not.

But not to worry. Microsoft has helpfully compiled a list of 20 jobs likely to be immune from the ravages of AI. They include dredge and pile driver operators, rail track layers, and roustabouts. At least that last one sounds colorful. I’d add one more from my own work history – mortar man, the person who pushes cement around a construction site in a wheelbarrow. Let’s see Claude do that.

This next iteration of creative destruction may enlist a less philosophical response than did the advent of globalization a few decades ago. Then the general view among the chattering classes was that, yes, there will be winners and losers, but in the aggregate we’ll all be better off. This time around, to paraphrase Keynes, in the aggregate we may all be unemployed.

So some concern is warranted. But there is a more hopeful view. To assess this, let me propose what I am calling the Bateson Test©, based on Gregory Bateson’s 1972 collection of essays, An Ecology of the Mind, kind of like the Bhagavad Ghita for 70s-era eco warriors. In reflecting on the utility of models, Bateson pointed out that “the map is not the territory” and so far he’s been more right than wrong. Similar to the Turing Test, a model would pass the Bateson Test only when it fully reflects reality. We’re not there yet.

For now, AI can still wake up in the morning and not be able to predict the close of the stock market that day, or the weather 24 hours hence. But maybe it can remember where it put the keys.

Woof!