Human Labor Built Our World, Now AI's Bullshit Freely Swirls

To adapt a quote by Scott Alexander: It is glorious what we can do with AI today, it is shameful what we do

The Laundress by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1761

I. Privileges we should strive to make custom

Isaac Asimov was a smart guy and a better writer. He got many predictions right. However, one that would’ve seemed rather easy for him to make ended up strangely wrong.

In a 1977 essay, Whatever You Wish, he wrote,

In a properly automated and educated world . . . machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile.

The world is already educated so… where are the humanizing machines?

Well, I could take the easy route: We are living in Asimov’s world—don’t you see how tech companies are outsourcing every task to automation? Don’t you have, like I do, a dishwasher, a TV, and a Roomba? The machines are here!

But despite 200 years of moral, social, and technological advances—human rights, the historically privileged chance of not having to work with your hands, a near-dead elemental foe, plenty of available books, and plenty of computers where you can write another one—our appealing utopia hasn’t quite materialized. I’m not saying we are worse off. We are better in many respects—in most respects. However, it’s a precarious progress subject to the opaque incentives of the monetary powers.¹ A progress disconnected from civilizational growth altogether.

An unevenly distributed future that’s yet to reach everyone is why not many people have their needs satisfied like I do; I can be a writer and spend my days inventing imaginary worlds because other people are building this one. My work feels pleasant while others do peasant work.

I take this privilege for granted more than I should. I admit this in shame because I forget, quite too often, that I’m standing on the tired shoulders of what appear to be giants but are actually human windmills, as Sancho Panza would say, with “sails that rotate the millstone” instead of arms. Those poor peasants grinding all day and night, my comfortable life not present even in their sweetest of dreams.

Machines or not, the powerful own this place. The peasants can’t get no relief. There must be some kind of way out of here, they think. And there is—

Asimov’s utopia isn’t impossible. It’s just bad business.

II. At the right time, on the wrong road

My privilege shouldn’t be such in this world of plenty. It should be commonplace. Novelist Francine Prose writes about this paradox in her book Reading Like a Writer:

When we think about how many terrifying things people are called on to do every day as they fight fires, defend their rights, perform brain surgery, give birth, drive on the freeway, and wash skyscraper windows, it seems frivolous, self-indulgent, and self-important to talk about writing as an act that requires courage.

She then defends the writer’s bravery, but the words I’ve chosen to quote here reveal that she acknowledges her privilege.²

Who doesn’t want a pleasurable aristocracy—one where courage abounds but is unnecessary to survive? That’s not our world. If everyone were to chase after that privilege today, who’d be left to fulfill the world’s basic needs? Who would fight fires, perform surgeries, and wash skyscraper windows?

If we all had a life like mine, no one could.

The democratization of my and Prose’s privilege is doable, though. We build. We leave tragedy behind “toward a shallower future”. So where’s the shame, really?

In the realization that we’re more preoccupied with building addictive algorithms than useful infrastructure and machinery. In the realization that capitalism isn’t about giving us what we want anymore but about “making us want what we don’t need.”

In the realization that we’re entering that timeline—the one where Asimov’s utopia becomes feasible and affordable; the one where Prose’s paradox fades away—and yet we are not taking that road.

III. Where's my laundry robot, anyway?

If you re-read Asimov’s conclusion, you’ll realize a single word is doing the heavy lifting: properly.

A “properly automated and educated world” implies that the products of that automatization are distributed to break the systemic inequality that allows the top 1% to own 30% of the wealth. That’s what “properly” means to me. If a few big corporations retain all the power, will we end up in a world where our wishes are properly granted? If our labor stops being of value, will we properly receive sustenance in exchange for just existing or will they suck off energy and pollute the air to feed and quench their machines?

We’ve been forging the tools and sowing the grounds to build one of the best utopias we could ever imagine just for the few to reap the ripe fruits. Wasn’t the raison d’être of capitalism to provide so much abundance that no one had to do anything they didn’t want to?

Well, the road we’ve taken is somewhat different.

What’s happening is not a democratization of my privilege but the devastation of it.

Source

As an AI enthusiast, I can’t help but feel complicit with that. I associated myself with that promising acronym because I fell in love with its potential.

But as a writer, I have to reject the notion that this is the best road or the only road. That this is a proper world.³

I don’t want technology to erase my privilege but to extend it to everyone else.

IV. Shared shame from mishandled gifts

C. S. Lewis wrote, like Prose, of the courage of writing and art during hard times:

The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.

I’d ask him: What if the war is of the kind you don’t know how to fight back? What if the war is between one of your halves and against the other; what if you find out, after all, that you were fighting for the wrong side? Lewis would look at me, disappointed that I understood nothing, and say:

“Then more reason to create the most beautiful art you’re capable of.”

So I keep writing.

And I keep waiting for Asimov’s utopia. And I keep cheering for worthy innovation and technology. And I support AI efforts that deserve it. And I criticize companies that don’t use their responsibility to enact this new world where humans can lay back or write or paint while their cheap robots do the laundry. I don’t see why we should give up on this humanitarian dream or reject technology as the main force that could bring it to life.

I’m hopeful that given enough time and the right incentives we can do it.

I’m just ashamed about how we’re handling our gifts.

Scott Alexander—rationalist, libertarian, and techno-optimist—once wrote:

I was standing on top of one of their many tall buildings, looking down at the city below, all lit up in the dark. If you’ve never been to Vegas, it is really impressive. Skyscrapers and lights in every variety strange and beautiful all clustered together. And I had two thoughts, crystal clear:

It is glorious that we can create something like this.

It is shameful that we did.

It is glorious what we can do with AI today.

It is shameful what we do.

1. There are many ways to account for inequality. There’s the income share of the richest 1% (before tax), from 1950 to 2022 in the US (from Our World in Data). There’s the rise of multimillionaires in the past few decades (from the World Inequality Report 2022) or the rise in billionaires’ total wealth in the US (from Inequality.org). Technological progress creates inevitable inequality—you know: The future is here, just unevenly distributed—which isn’t that bad in the long run. In the short run, however, it matters that the wealth we create lifts the big shiny boats 10 times higher than the tiny scrappy ones. Especially when it can be done the other way around without misusing the tide of progress (I genuinely think it’s possible—and desirable—we just need to consider the roads of innovation we don’t take because it’s not good business.)

2. It’s the privileged, most of all, who should show the courage that’s expected of them. With great privilege comes great responsibility and writers like me enjoy the utmost privilege of living in a world that beat the elemental foe sufficiently hard to not hear it at the other side of the brittle walls of civilization. Mine is the responsibility of intellectuals as Noam Chomsky would say.

3. Many AI-driven or AI-enabled projects are beneficial for humanity (e.g. AlphaFold or applications to fight climate change) but the ones that receive the most funding (e.g. military weaponry) and require the most resources (e.g. large language models) aren’t intended for such humanitarian causes. The former is often for war or “defense”. The latter is used to a disproportionate degree for automatizing spam and scams.