I am very grateful for the washing machine in my apartment. Throughout my life, doing laundry has been one of my least favourite chores, so tossing clothes in a machine and having it do all that work is a great blessing.
But, more than being a less tedious way of washing, using a machine is also a way of getting back time for myself. You see, this is something technology tends to do very well. Instead of spending hours washing clothes by hand, I can use a machine and be done in 15 minutes. In a sense, every great technological leap has given back time to human beings to reinvest in other areas by making some activity less time-consuming to do.
Take transportation, for example. Horses cut down transportation time by eliminating walking. Cars, trains, and ships eliminated horses, giving us back even more time. And now you can fly from Nigeria to London in less time than it takes to get from one point in Nigeria to another by road. With each of these advancements, people have been able to spend less time on the activity of getting to one place from another, and reinvest that time doing other things.
One idea that I keep hearing these days from proponents of unfettered AI (and technological) advancement is that these things will free up more time for humans, as technology tends to do. But, on a much larger scale than the technologies that have come before. The ultimate hope goes something like this: With robots to do all the menial work and AI to do all the thinking for us, we will have unlimited time on our hands to do whatever we please. A utopia if ever there was one.
Or is it?
I’m very wary of where we are headed as a species technologically. Yes, the advancement of AI will undoubtedly give us back time as we offload several cognitive tasks to AI. But, perhaps the most important question is this: what are we going to do with all that time?
You see, getting back time is not good in itself. It’s what we do with the time that matters. The people who spend their lives playing video games in a dank basement have a lot of time on their hands. But I suspect that most of us don’t think that they are using it particularly well.
I worry because the last decade or two has seen unprecedented technological advancement. And yet, it seems to me that we have spent a good amount of all the time freed up by those advancements in servitude to our screens and especially to social media. Doomscrolling is a widely recognised phenomenon now, and everyone and their aunt is on Instagram creating picture-perfect, aesthetically pleasing, carefully curated online personas.
We wake up, brush our teeth, and hit the screens (iykyk). And yet, we mostly default to using the worst parts of the online world. There are so many useful and stimulating resources on the web, and it would be great if we all defaulted to consuming those kinds of content, but the reality is that we don’t. Things like porn addiction and online gambling, for example, seem to be at an all-time high, everywhere you look someone is caught in those webs.
To make matters worse, the problem isn’t limited to clearly harmful things like porn and gambling. Take Social Media, for example, People no longer know how to communicate courteously or live in community with people of differing opinions because social media is conditioning us for extreme speech and behaviour every day (looking at you, Twitter). Social bonds are breaking down, reality and truth are fracturing, and even basic human kindness/decency is fast being thrown out the window.
Admittedly, there is a sense in which you could say that all this is down to agency. After all, anybody can choose what to do with their time. And that is true. You can choose to scroll Instagram or read Shakespeare in your free time, it’s completely up to you. This is true, clearly.
But, as a designer, I’m always thinking about the fact that people tend to act in the ways the systems they’re involved in have been designed to incentivise them to act. For example, it’s easy to say, “just don’t use social media,” but in a world where career opportunities and advancements seem to accrue to the more socially visible people will continue to use social media despite its adverse effects. Could we design a better internet that promotes healthier behaviour? I believe so, I really do, but that is not what we have right now. What we have right now is this internet of hyperreal and vitriol.
And the algorithm makers — the overlords of this new regime — realise that this dysfunction is profitable, and so they pump it into our feeds by the bucket load. Twitter is toxic, yes, but have you considered that maybe that place is optimised for toxicity because toxicity is lucrative and they know it?
So, yes, people could decide to do better things with their free time. But it’s not surprising that so many people choose to do these self-destructive things, it’s the way the world we live in and the internet we have has been designed, unfortunately.
A few weeks ago, on a Sunday, I walked into the church behind a young man, and so we sat next to each other. As soon as he settled into his seat, he brought out his phone, cleaned the screen, opened Twitter and began scrolling. That young man’s behaviour really surprised me. I would have assumed that there were still sacred places left, places where we walk into and immediately realise that our doomscrolling is off limits here because we are in the presence of something important. And I’m not just talking about religious institutions, even classrooms are suffering the same fate. Ted Gioia’s essay, What’s Happening to The Students, features a desperate plea from an American teacher, and in it she says:
First of all the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever. They live on their phones. And they’re just fed a constant stream of dopamine from the minute their eyes wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night.
Because they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school, they behave like addicts. They’re super emotional. The smallest things set them off.When you are standing in front of them trying to teach, they’re vacant. They have no ability to tune in…. They’re not there.
And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.
Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of work in this area and is constantly pointing out the pitfalls of giving children smartphones when they’re young, especially given the adverse effects that constant smartphone usage can have. If I were to summarise Jonathan’s work, I might do it with this short video. An entire generation sacrificed at the altar of doomscrolling for parental convenience.
Now, before I get too off course talking about phones and social media, I want to remind us what I think the problem is. The claim is that as we offload more human activities to AI, we will have more time to do whatever we want. The problem, as I see it, is that the way we spend our free time right now is incredibly unhealthy. So, there is every reason to imagine that should we have more free time on our hands, we will end up spending that time on unhealthy things, and that’s not a good thing. Having free time is not de facto good, having free time and spending it well is.
In essence, the AI believers are saying: “Once we have time on our hands because we don’t need to work anymore, we will enter a utopia of sorts where people can do whatever they want.”
And I’m saying: “Well, there’s no reason why this doesn’t lead to a dystopia instead. Because, when we’ve had time given back to us lately, we’ve ended up spending that time on bad things. Who says we won’t spend all our AI-generated free time doing even more unhealthy things and eventually ruining ourselves?”
But this is not the only problem.
As we have seen, one problem with the “AI will give us time to do what we really want” rhetoric is that we are not making the best use of the time we do have right now. There are no guarantees that we will make better use of the free time AI will free up.
The other problem, and perhaps the more important one, is how we get to this utopia of endless free time. What needs to happen, as I understand it, is that AI needs to get sufficiently good at all the things humans do currently, in order to leave us with nothing to do. Or as Paul Graham recently so eloquently put it in a recent exchange with Garry Tan:
The question is pretty straightforward: if you invent something that can do everything humans do, what will humans do? I’m yet to come across a convincing answer.
And perhaps worse is that there are people in places of power who have a say in the development of this technology who don’t think it’s even a question worth asking. They just take it for granted that things will keep chugging along as they always have. People like Garry Tan.
Disclaimer: I like Garry a lot.
Ultimately, I think that Garry makes a mistake that a lot of AI enthusiasts seem to be making right now: they think of AI as an enhancer, like all the other tech that has come before. Improving one or multiple areas of life, but never usurping the uniquely human component of doing things completely.
For example, the digital calculator was a massive upgrade on the abacus as a device for manipulating numbers. It made it possible for anyone to do relatively complex calculations on the fly, it enhanced the mathematician’s ability to do calculations, but it did not completely usurp the mathematician’s role and start doing math by itself.
Generally speaking, if you think about any technology we have created until now, it falls into this category of enhancer. They enabled us to do much more in conjunction with the technology than we could have done on our own. The combination of smartphones and Google is one of my favourite examples. Google practically indexed all the world’s information, and smartphones made it possible to carry that index in our pockets while walking around. It’s like having a second, gigantic brain in your pocket, making it possible to find out almost anything on the fly. But Google did not replace thinking. You could access information relevant to whatever question is on your mind, but you still had to think about it, to synthesise it yourself, with your own brain.
Your brain + Google = Superpowers.
AI is not like that at all. AI is not an enhancer, it’s a replacer.
In Katie Hafner’s book Where Wizards Stay Up Late, which documents the development of modern computing from its earliest days, she writes:
The SAGE system inspired a few thinkers, including Licklider, to see computing in an entirely new light. SAGE was an early example of what Licklider would later call the “symbiosis” between humans and machines, where the machine functions as a problem-solving partner.
Implied in this symbiotic relationship was the interdependency of humans and computers working in unison as a single system. For instance, in a battle scenario, human operators without computers would be unable to calculate and analyze threats quickly enough to counter an attack. Conversely, computers working alone would be unable to make crucial decisions.
J. R. C. Licklider was one of the pioneers of the modern computing paradigm at ARPA (now known as DARPA), he was also an eminent psychologist before he switched his interests from human behaviour to computers. There is perhaps no one better placed to explain how the relationship between humans and computers was viewed at the time, and that is how he saw it: interdependency, symbiosis, a man-machine partnership.
But that quote also explains what is going to be different about AI if you look closely. For the most part, Licklider has been right: computers can’t make crucial decisions. Even today, in modern warfare, where the role of computers has grown and grown, it’s still human beings who make the final and crucial decisions, albeit heavily influenced by what the computers say.
But. AI is going to be able to make crucial decisions. Eventually, I imagine that it will not just be possible but more efficient to hand over more and more of the decision-making processes in warfare to AI. Just as everywhere else, we will hand over more and more of most — if not all — kinds of processes to AI. Computing, engineering, marketing, you name it. Humans will, I think, mostly be replaced by this thing.
However, I think I understand the Garry Tans of this world. We’re currently at a stage of AI development where it does act like an enhancer, and I think that is part of the confusion. Right now, the most common uses of AI are alongside human beings. As copilots in the process of writing code, for example, or, my personal favourite, as a research assistant while studying some topic or writing an essay (like this one). AI assistants are everywhere, and it might be lulling us into the idea that that is all this tech will ever be.
But we know that is not true, and there are signs already on the horizon. The Studio Ghibli mania a few weeks ago was a case in point. ChatGPT’s ability to generate Studio Ghibli type characters completely takes the animator out of the process. What might happen if we get to the point where an OpenAI model can create feature-length Ghibli-style animated movies from start to finish? At that point, it’s not just the animator being replaced, but the entire apparatus necessary for making a Studio Ghibli film today. Everyone, from animators to directors, will be completely replaced.
But this will not happen only to the good people at Studio Ghibli; it will happen to all of us eventually if the AI prophets are to be believed. It’s already happening to software engineers, soon AI doctors, nurses, customer service reps, product managers, graphic designers, and on and on.
And this won’t be a glitch, it’s all part of the plan. Listen to the language of utopia hopefuls: “AI will give us infinite free time because it will free us from ever having to do anything.”
YOU WILL NEVER HAVE TO DO ANYTHING EVER AGAIN. NEVER.
Isn’t that just wonderful?
It seems like a great vision, but to me, that just reads like a threat. What are human beings if they do not do things? To do is an integral part of what it means to be a person. To try, to fail, to be challenged, to be stretched and pushed beyond your limit by a task, all these are not accidental to being a human being; they are essential.
To quote Dorothy Sayers here:
I have already, on a previous occasion, spoken at some length on the subject of Work and Vocation. What I urged then was a thoroughgoing revolution in our whole attitude to work. I asked that it should be looked upon, not as a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. That it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God’s image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing.
And if Dorothy is too preachy for you, here is secular minimalist Joshua Becker expressing pretty much the same sentiment:
Whether by creation or evolution, humans are designed to work. This is an important part of our nature. It explains our drive to grow as individuals and as a society. It explains the internal satisfaction we experience when completing a task. It makes sense of the positive emotions we experience when resting after a hard day of work.
Maybe my inability to see what humans do in an AI-saturated future is a failure of imagination on my part. Maybe with all the things we do now taken over by AI, we will find new things to do. I don’t imagine humans just lazing about in leisure forever after all. There are so many possibilities right now and the future is not clear at all.
However, just like we now have an internet that might have been better designed if we’d pursued a different set of principles years ago, so we now have an emerging technology that will definitely define the future, and the set of principles we choose in developing it now have to be the best we can possibly choose. I do not think that approaching human happiness by trying to make it unnecessary for human beings to do things is the best approach to take.
Let us pray.
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