Hello all,
I’ve been continuing to think about AI, because it’s quite hard to think about anything else these days.
It’s impossible to predict the future with any accuracy, and yet we’re all forced to reckon with whether AI will make any difference to our industries and our jobs. Nobody wants to be taken by surprise.
If you’ve spent any time around AI discourse recently, you might have heard some AI exec wanging on about the “Jevons paradox”. It’s the idea that when something gets more efficient, we don’t use less of it; we end up using more of it. It’s become a favourite reassurance of AI folks: “Don’t worry, your industry won’t shrink, it’ll grow! There’ll be more demand for what you do, not less!”
Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? But is it true of your industry? And even if it is, does it mean that humans stay employed, or just that we end up with lots of extremely busy robots?
This week’s article explores what determines whether an industry ends up in a Jevons-y place or not, and perhaps more pressingly, whether us humans end up helped – or replaced.
Best,
Rob
This week’s article
Jevons only knows
Jevons paradox gets thrown around a lot in the context of AI, but it’s a useful lens through which to view an industry or a role. Should you run towards or away from what you’re currently doing?
Click here to read the article »
This week’s six interesting links
Chain Your Heart to a Star: Fee Warner and the Marc Bolan Rock Shrine
A couple of months ago I made my first documentary film: Chain Your Heart to a Star. It’s the story of Fee Warner, who for 48 years has been visiting the site of Marc Bolan’s death in south-west London. There she has built, and continues to maintain, what has become a shrine to Bolan and T. Rex. The shrine is visited by people from all over the world, and is enduring evidence of the depth of feeling we humans have for music and musicians. #
Investigating a possible scammer in journalism’s AI Era
Nicholas Hune-Brown in The Local exhibits more diligence than most publications in tracking down the source of an AI-written pitch:
“I was embarrassed. I had been naively operating with a pre-ChatGPT mindset, still assuming a pitch’s ideas and prose were actually connected to the person who sent it. Worse, the reason the pitch had been appealing to me to begin with was likely because a large language model somewhere was remixing my own prompt asking for stories where ‘health and money collide,’ flattering me by sending me back what I wanted to hear.”
Such grubby scams are, he thinks, reflective of the diminished media environment we live in:
“Every media era gets the fabulists it deserves. If Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and the other late 20th century fakers were looking for the prestige and power that came with journalism in that moment, then this generation’s internet scammers are scavenging in the wreckage of a degraded media environment. They’re taking advantage of an ecosystem uniquely susceptible to fraud – where publications with prestigious names publish rickety journalism under their brands, where fact-checkers have been axed and editors are overworked, where technology has made falsifying pitches and entire articles trivially easy, and where decades of devaluing journalism as simply more ‘content’ have blurred the lines so much it can be difficult to remember where they were to begin with.”
Immunisation against these sorts of scams and misinformation is possible, as Hune-Brown demonstrates with his dogged investigative work. But the skills needed are precisely the ones that the media have spent the last decade or two gutting. It does not bode well. #
Brett Christophers on waste
This whole piece, about what happens to the waste our modern economy produces by the billions of tons, is fascinating. But I particularly liked this bit as a novel and useful explanation of something I’ve thought about before, but not in these terms:
“Three other insights about value from political economy are helpful here. The first is that use value and exchange value are not equally important under capitalism – or, more precisely, are not of equal importance to capitalists. Marx showed that where the two are in tension, as they often are, exchange value overrides use value: the imperatives of competition and accumulation mean that commodities must be produced principally for sale. What counts as ‘waste’ comes to be decided by reference to wealth creation and preservation. This is what Locke was doing when he justified the European annexation of Indigenous territories on the grounds that they were not being used ‘productively’: the land was, in other words, being wasted, and should be brought into the ambit of capitalist modernity and its calculus of value. In a present-day example, Franklin-Wallis describes seeing a batch of unused TVs from a major manufacturer at a US electronics ‘recycling’ plant waiting to be destroyed in order not to act as competition for the same manufacturer’s new line of products. In 2020 Apple sued a Canadian recycler for selling off some of the half a million unsold devices it had sent to be shredded. In July 2018 it was reported that Burberry had incinerated ‘deadstock’ worth £28 million in the previous financial year to prevent its being sold at discounted rates. And so on.”
AI-powered nimbyism
As Frederik Pohl said, “a good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”
Lots of optimism about AI in its early days focused on how it might make the job of people in bureaucratic roles much easier, as it massively increased their information-processing bandwidth. But here is the flipside:
“A new service called Objector is offering ‘policy-backed objections in minutes’ to people who are upset about planning applications near their homes.
“It uses generative AI to scan planning applications and check for grounds for objection, ranking these as ‘high’, ‘medium’ or ‘low’ impact. It then automatically creates objection letters, AI-written speeches to deliver to the planning committees, and even AI-generated videos to ‘influence councillors’.”
This is the tricky future we must navigate. One particularly unsavoury detail:
“Kent residents Hannah and Paul George designed the system after estimating they spent hundreds of hours attempting to navigate the planning process when they opposed plans to convert a building near their home into a mosque.”
Four theories of Meta
Jeremiah Johnson with a dystopian piece on the seeming contradiction between Meta’s unstoppable financial success and its obviously corrosive social impact, with a depressing conclusion:
“The only thing scarier to me than a mega-billionaire shoving pornified-AI bots down society’s throat is the idea that even if Zuck wasn’t doing that, we’d be clamoring for someone to step up and do it in his place. And that theory of Meta is what I ultimately think is the correct one. Why did Meta shift from promoting human connection to promoting porny AI chatbots? Because they have access to better data than anyone in the world about what people actually want, and that’s what the data tells them. The terrifying truth might be that even if Meta closed up shop tomorrow, their vision of an AI future would come to pass regardless. Maybe the people just want what they want, and they’re going to end up getting it good and hard.”
Fugitive father shot dead by NZ police
Last year I linked to a Slate story about Tom Phillips, a New Zealand father who disappeared with his kids into the bush. Back then, the story was complex enough, with unclear motivations, a potential custody battle, and an underlying theme of hardy, resilient bush men resisting the opressively civilising influence of modern society and government forces. Some argued Phillips was essentially kidnapping his own children; others that he was a modern-day “man alone”, teaching his kids an admirable sort of self-reliance.
The story ended tragically today; Phillips was shot by police during a bungled burglary in which he fired at officers with a rifle. #