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This Productivity Boom Is Brought To You By Skynet
It's AI's world, we just live in it.
Or at least that's the impression you'd get if you went by the increasingly frenzied, sometimes paranoid, headlines that've accompanied the meteoric rise of ChatGPT and related applications in 2023.
I've scaled up my own AI coverage commensurate with the overall decibel level, but also in an effort to keep myself apprised. Maybe it's a fad, but it isn't Bored Ape Yacht Club. Generative AI will draw you a Bored Ape, and assuming you don't ask for too many of
I am more concerned with the coming flood of AI-enabled disinformation than with AI-driven labor market disruption.
Humans are not ready for fictional photos, videos, audio that are indistinguishable from truth. Federal jackboots herding MAGA patriots into concentration camps, trans groomers forcibly converting innocent children, Biden plotting America’s takeover with Xi – a too-high percentage of Americans will believe this to be true when shown incontrovertible video proof.
We need, STAT, laws criminalizing the publication and distribution of deepfake media, including by social media. We won’t get them – at least not in the US.
A young friend is going to graduate school in technology policy, and is choosing between three top schools – one in Silicon Valley, one in the seat of America’s government, and one in the heart of the EU. I advised her to choose the last one.
Not that labor market disruption is not a threat, but at least theoretically it also offers societal benefits. There is no societal benefit to disinformation.
After reading the Bloomberg headline regarding Goldman’s forecast of an 18% decline in global employment, I pondered on the potential implications of such a statistic. Considering this figure, I couldn’t help but imagine how a company like Accenture could significantly boost its margins by eliminating middle management positions. With a workforce of approximately 380,000 employees, a reduction of 18% would equate to $6.7 billion in cost savings for the company. Even the likes of Elon Musk or Hank Rearden would find it difficult to prevent upper management from pursuing such significant margin improvements.
And generative AI would make more sense than most middle management in these companies.
But seriously, like most advances this may remove a lot of the “dog work”. In my past life of coding this was: documenting, understanding other people’s code, ad migrating from one database to another. But it leaves the hard difficult things such as deciding what needs to be built, and verifying what has been coded works as you want on all platforms and in scenarios you have never thought of.