Opinion: The problem with AI isn't that it will take away jobs; it may take away our humanity
There's been a lot of discussion in the Opp Now community about the risks and benefits of AI—as workers, as writers, as artists, and as polemicists. Jacobin magazine's Marianela D’Aprile chimes in with an essay worrying about the potential anti-social elements of AI, as it might strip away our ability to think for ourselves and understand others.
The problem is that robots are going to put us out of jobs we don’t want to be doing in the first place, but we are not going to reap the benefits of that displacement. We are not going to get more time to ourselves because we can do our dumb email job fifty times faster with AI, and we are not going to get paid more because we are more efficient. (David Graeber made this argument more than a decade ago in Bullshit Jobs.)
What is more likely to happen — perhaps already happening — and what I consider tragic is that the robots will replace us not just in a practical sense, i.e., at work, but in the sense that they will make us less human. We’ll depend on them at work, and then to write a letter to our landlord, and then eventually we will be so out of the practice of thinking that we’ll need a LLM to compose a text to our girlfriend (or like in that pulled Google ad, to help our daughter write a letter to her favorite athlete). They will help us bypass a process that doesn’t just make us better artists or writers but, crucially, better people.
Thinking well, and the necessary self-reflection that accompanies and facilitates it, increases our capacity for things like empathy, generosity, and solidarity. It deepens our ability to hold two or more contradictory ideas at once. It connects us with ourselves so that we can connect with others. It makes us more thoroughly part of humanity.
Of course, make-work and toil are hardly the pinnacle of deep-thinking opportunities. But the proliferation of LLMs is making an already dire situation — in which people don’t get almost any time to think for themselves, to do things that fulfill them, that deepen their capacity for love and empathy and everything else I named above — much worse.
The employment of these models is deeply antisocial not only because they cut off communication between two humans, but also and more importantly because they cut off communication with and within the self. Their use foments an instrumentalist view of writing and even speaking, of language itself, foreclosing the possibility that we might use language as a means of discovery. When a LLM spits out a text based on a prompt, it makes something that looks like an essay or a poem but cannot be either of those things, because it communicates not the true consciousness of its creator but merely her original intent. Any writer knows that you rarely make the thing you intended to.
Writing, ideally, is a means through which to make expressible the otherwise inexpressible, a means through which to find what is otherwise hidden. I cannot talk the way I write; my ideas are for the most part inexpressible and therefore unknowable to me in speech. I think the same is true for people who wouldn’t call themselves writers.
There is something valuable in that little mystery, something that links us to each other, thereby making life worth living and the struggle for a better world worth waging. Without exposure to that mystery, we stop being part of humanity and instead become mere cogs in the completely arbitrary, exploitative system that happens to organize our working lives.
Marianela D’Aprile is a writer living in Brooklyn. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Read the whole thing here.
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