AI is the new hot topic in just about every area of technology. ChatGPT is coming for your authors and product jobs! Midjourney and DALL-E are coming for the artists! Nothing is safe! Italy bans ChatGPT because it’s a threat to humanity! In the distance – sirens! Bleh.
Or maybe you’re reading the other side of the internet? AI is here to save us all. Here’s 50 tips on how to use ChatGPT in your job, your classroom, your little league team. Now you don’t have to write all those things you hated, now you never have to pay for anything ever again, because the AI can just get it for you. Equal amounts of Bleh.
Here’s my take – It’s all of those things, and it’s none of those things. What happens next is up to us, and we need to steer clear of diving into either side of the debate too far. Blocking AI development and refusing to engage with the tools is short-sighted and frankly stupid, while simply powering forwards with no oversight or reticence is equally foolish. So how should we be using AI, and what’s up with that ridiculous clickbait title? Let’s get into it.
The Problem
AI inherently replaces human effort. Yes, jobs will be lost over this. Let’s get that out in the open right away. It’s inevitable, and it’s hard. Nobody should deny that, and anyone who does is probably trying to sell something.
The problem is, we’ve been through this hundreds of times before. Computers replaced people at NASA who were literally called human computers – people who sat all day poring over complex mathematical equations. The invention of medicine meant that leech pickers were no longer in such high demand. Even further back, ploughs and other tools meant that you needed less farm workers to pull in a harvest. Advancement inevitably has a human cost, and that sucks. We should be aware of that, we should have plans in place to help people affected by the advancement of technology.
There are many, many jobs that won’t be around in 10 years, 20 years, even 5 years if the tech crowd have their way. The first stories about hundreds of people getting laid off due to being replaced by an AI system that can do their job with less mistakes and greater efficiency are frankly months away at this point, because some companies will not hesitate to pump up their bottom line. Helpdesk workers have seen this for years already, with chatbots replacing call centres at breakneck speed.
So why am I still upbeat about the potential of AI?
The Opportunity
That all sounded pretty cataclysmic, but here’s where I think we deserve a little optimism.
Human computers being replaced by digital ones accelerated our speed of work by decades, and those people didn’t just go and die in a ditch. Take for example the indomitable Katherine Johnson – NASA human computer, and absolute badass. Seriously, go and read about her. It’s more important than my little blog.
Katherine’s job disappeared when NASA adopted digital computers in 1958. But she didn’t. For almost 30 years after that, she was still there – verifying the computer’s work, using the computers herself to save her grunt work and ensure that her talents were available exactly where they were needed, putting the first American man in orbit, putting Apollo 11 on the Moon, and rescuing Apollo 13. She became more adept at using the machines that nominally “replaced” her than just about anyone who didn’t build them in the first place, because she had the skills herself that the computer replicated.
Because of Katherine’s willingness to adopt, change, and reapply her knowledge where it mattered most, the job that “disappeared” transformed into the jobs that exist today – data analysis, data science, people regularly use the tools that could have mostly replaced them, because it turns out people are pretty great and we still need them.
I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. AI, machine learning, large language models – all these are tools. Tools that can and will replace people, but are infinitely better when guided by people with the skills to know how to do the job themselves. Some day that will change, and there’ll be a form of AI that is functionally indistinguishable from a person. That day is not happening in 2023.
A large part of what I do involves writing, and I’ve literally had conversations with other people in product and documentation positions where they’re concerned that it’ll be possible to automate a huge chunk of everything that we do in the very near future.
To that, I say “Good”.
AI can replace me
Maybe I’m being flippant and overconfident, but I’m absolutely willing to let AI replace me, or at least the parts of me I don’t need to exist.
There is an endless amount of work that we do each and every day that humans would rather not be doing. Manual processing work, data entry, writing boring, bland summaries, documentation that does not need more than a simple summary of what’s on the page – click the confirm button to confirm. There is absolutely no inherent value in a human being sitting down and typing those words, and yet for decades, someone has had to do that. I have had to do that. AI can and should take that burden away, freeing up time of skilled people to focus on what matters.
Content moderation is another huge opportunity – Facebook and other social media platform go through thousands of people, forcing them to endure horrifying images and hate speech reported by users every day until they burn out and quit (or worse). There is no reason why humans should have to do that work in the future – AI can take that burden, ensuring that nobody has to drink themselves into unconsciousness to make what they’ve seen at work go away.
AI is a tool, and we’re at the perfect time to learn to work alongside it to improve our lives and shape the roles of tomorrow. Humans are frankly rubbish at doing nothing – when one job goes away, we can and should create 50 more to fill its place, and every new job that will exist in an AI-assisted society will be hugely more fulfilling for the worker. No more grunt work, just the parts that matter.
Someday humanity won’t have to work at all, and we’ll have a serious social issue on our hands. That’s one we need to solve sooner, rather than later. But we should also be working to integrate AI with our existing working lives. The role of humans in tomorrow’s world is that of a guide, the coach. We train the AI to replace ourselves so that we can move on to the next thing, and then the next. We focus our time and attention on the things that matter, the insight and value that we add beyond the simple production of assets and words.
So that’s why I’m OK with the AI replacing me, because it won’t replace me – it will replace parts of my job. Everything I know is still applicable, everything I do still has value, but the grunt work? The initial drafting, the agonising over form and thought? That can happily become a thing of the past. I’m an editor and a guide now. We all are. AI can only replace you if you remain static and unable to see how you can add value. So don’t let it happen. Remain open, integrate the tools we have into your workflow, and ensure that we don’t grow stagnant just to keep jobs that shouldn’t exist.