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"Listen, and understand! That Terminator is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... EVER, until your job has been fully automated!" —Kyle Reese in a reboot of "The Terminator," possibly.
If you're going to write an essay about the rewards and risks of artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation, which pop culture hook do you start with? There are almost too many to choose from. "2001: A Space Odyssey," "The Terminator," "Dune," or if you want to go all the way back to 1889 (not a typo), you can have William Grove's "The Wreck of a World," where intelligent machines revolt against the human race.
Personally, I'm more of a "WALL•E" guy.
Ever since seeing Robby the Robot in "Forbidden Planet" on Saturday night TV, I've always thought of robots as friendly and helpful. A year or two later, "Star Wars" introduced us all to R2-D2 and C-3PO — robot versions of Shakespeare's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or Kurosawa's Tahei and Matashichi, although I had no idea at the time — and sealed the deal in my eight-year-old brain.
Bring on the robots! The more intelligent, the more humanlike, the better. Although now, as a middle-aged man with three shedding dogs and two messy teenagers, I'd settle for a Roomba that can do the stairs.
Seeing HAL murder Frank Poole and nearly kill David Bowman failed to dampen my enthusiasm. When the American supercomputer Colossus and the Soviets' Guardian conspired across Cold War lines to rule the world, I figured it might be for the best.
Maybe I'm a slow learner.
Although when Proteus IV impregnated Julie Christie in 1977's "Demon Seed," it put me off AI for at least a week. That movie was genuinely creepy — particularly the final line, spoken by a toddler with Robert Vaughn's voice. If you've never seen "Demon Seed," it's held up nicely, even after almost 50 years.
Automation brings change, and change can be frightening. We get "saboteurs" from the wooden shoes — sabots — French peasants supposedly threw into the gears of the newfangled machinery, making their jobs obsolete during the first days of the Industrial Revolution. And except for a few cranks who wear it as a badge of honor, "Luddite" is generally not a term of endearment.
But never forget this: automation of one kind or another is responsible for every advance in human history, every increase in wealth, every moment of comfort, leisure, and safety.
The story of animal life here on planet Earth, from the simplest single-cell organisms to the first humans to walk upright, is the same. It's a daily struggle for calories — and, by extension, a struggle not to become somebody else's calories.
For 98% of human history — at least since we gave up being hunter-gatherers and settled down on farms — 98% of human beings scratched at the dirt to obtain enough calories to thrive while trying not to get eaten by wolves or taken out by floods. They produced enough of a surplus — usually, anyway — to allow cities to thrive in those few "cradles of civilization" along the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus, and the Yellow rivers.
Maybe I'm exaggerating the percentages, but if so, not by much. At the time of the American Revolution, the typical American enjoyed a better life than the typical Englishman, Scot, or Irish back in the old country — and yet it’s estimated that about 90% of Americans worked in subsistence agriculture. We think of colonial Boston, Philly, and New York, but the truth is that only about 5% of Revolution-era America was urban.
In a modern economy like ours, maybe one percent of the population is engaged in farming — and produces such a wealth of calories that obesity is related to poverty, not to wealth. (That so many of our calories are waist-expanding garbage is a separate issue from their head-spinning bounty.)
Automation changed all that. The Industrial Revolution automated the production of goods and food, leading to a plenty that was previously unimaginable. The Internet Revolution automated communications, and the corresponding network effects led to yet another wealth explosion.
And Another Thing: The distribution of wealth created by the Internet Revolution, and how bad trade deals allowed a sizable fraction of that wealth to go overseas, is a topic for another essay. Come to think of it, I might have already written that one.
The last major wave of automation — the Internet Revolution — still hasn’t fully settled, and already the AI Revolution is upon us. But maybe they aren’t separate revolutions at all. Maybe AI is simply the Internet’s final form — something for our future robot historians to argue over. But here's how I see it: AI might seem like just the internet on steroids. But it’s not just faster — it’s different. It doesn’t just move information; it generates it. AI automates creativity.
Examples abound, but I'll give you a personal anecdote.
I've long had in mind two alt-history novels — a series of novels, actually — one each in alternate versions of the 20th century's world wars. I can write a scene and I have a solid hold on characterization and dialogue. What I don't have is the time or inclination to do the scut-work of creating the kind of detailed outline I'd need to make the writing possible.
Then I spent a Saturday with ChatGPT, playing around with characters, their arcs, and plot points necessary to an exciting war yarn. I was blown away by GPT's utility. Together, we figured out that one character — a German S.S. officer — would be more interesting if he were an all-too-human mix of evil and tragic, instead of just evil. When I suggested how to introduce him with just his name and four more words, here's what happened next:
Not perfect, but in seconds, GPT turned my pencil sketch into something with dimension — and showed me how to add some color.
I also tried having GPT write complete scenes, and the results were not worthy of publication. AI is still a terrible writer (for now), but an incredible editor and research assistant. As a writer, my job isn't just safe (for now!) from AI — it's enhanced by AI. A few more hours with ChatGPT and I'll have a complete outline... maybe I finally will write that novel. But anyone in the visual arts has my sympathies because, if your job hasn't been made redundant yet, it likely soon will be.
The arts (even the more mundane arts like writing opinion pieces) are far from humanity's only creative endeavor, however.
Israeli tech firm Fiverr cofounder and CEO Micha Kaufman sent a heads-up email to his employees that quickly leaked last week. "Here is the unpleasant truth," he wrote, "Al is coming for your jobs. Heck, it's coming for my job too. This is a wake-up call."
Emphasis added.
More:
You must understand that what was once considered "easy tasks" will no longer exist; what was considered "hard tasks" will be the new easy, and what was considered "impossible tasks" will be the new hard. If you do not become an exceptional talent at what you do, a master, you will face the need for a career change in a matter of months.
In some countries, the super-duper automation allowed by AI is perhaps a bit less about profit-driving efficiencies and more of a strategic necessity. I was just in touch with an old friend currently visiting Japan. Check-in at his hotel, he told me, was handled by audioanimatronic dinosaurs.
Yes, really.
There was also an android — I prefer the term "artificial person," myself — behind the desk and, curiously, "she" was the only robot there that didn't speak. If talking dinosaur hotel staff seems like a gimmick, well, maybe it is.
And yet, in a country with a shrinking population, automation becomes the one vital growth industry. Even a gimmicky labor-saver is still a labor-saver.
Case in point: China’s not-so-gimmicky RoboCops.
Behind those plexiglass "faces" is a networked and AI-enhanced computer. If China's real-world RoboCops aren't armed with pistols, they are armed with something potentially much more dangerous: facial recognition. I'd tell you to imagine a city where, when somebody's social credit score drops too low, a 3-D model of their face and head is immediately broadcast to the city's thousands of RoboCops.
And for all we know, maybe they are authorized to use deadly force. Also keep in mind that the difference between a RoboCop and a RoboSoldier is a firmware update and a gun.
But whether RoboCops turn out to be nothing more than a benign, labor-saving automation or a tool of Communist repression, the need for them comes from the same place: demographics. Japan's population started shrinking in 2011. China's working-age population began its long decline the very next year.
When I first learned of Japan's sad demographic destiny many years ago, I joked that if you wanted to see Japan's future, picture the Home Islands dotted with nursing homes, attended by robots, and guarded by automated BattleMechs.
It's still true. The only update I might make after 25 years is to replace "BattleMechs" with "drone swarms."
The lesson they learned in the Far East is that you gotta automate if you're not gonna procreate. Europe chose a different direction, squashing innovation via regulation and importing Third World hordes to do their work instead of building AI-powered androids. Only time will tell for certain which was the smarter approach, but I don't need C-3PO to calculate the odds for me.
Writing for the Center for a New American Security last month, the Hudson Institute's Bill Drexel warned readers of the "world-altering stakes of Sino-American AI competition."
"Just as nuclear weapons revolutionized 20th-century geopolitics, artificial intelligence (AI) is primed to transform 21st-century power dynamics," Drexel argued, "with world leaders increasingly suggesting its impact may prove even more profound."
I don't want to take you too deep into the weeds of Drexel's lengthy article, so let me just set the stakes:
In the Cold War, both nuclear and space competitions assumed ethical, ideological, and national prestige dimensions well beyond the technologies’ direct contribution to hard economic or military power, with formative effects on the overall Soviet-American rivalry. Similarly, Sino-American AI competition today is poised to redefine conflict norms, state power, emerging bioethics, and catastrophic risks—four domains demanding deliberate attention due to their world-altering significance.
If AI pans out as expected, it won't just alter the speed of conflict, it opens up new arenas for conflict, every bit as much as flight did in the first half of the 20th century and spaceflight does now.
Please note that Europe and the UK — which gave us the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith, English liberty, and the World Wide Web — aren't even in the running. By the time the European Commission on the Correct Use of Foreign Things We Don't Like But Still Need convenes its Third Plenary Discussion on Proper AI Regulation and Taxation, private firms in the U.S. and China will have made three more leaps.
On my personal timeline, the internet went from a fun campus curiosity in the late ’80s to how I met and stayed in touch with friends in the ’90s to how I earned my living by 2005. AI emerged almost out of nowhere in 2022 with the public launch of ChatGPT. In 30 months, it has gone from a curiosity to a tool I wouldn't want to live without to a potential rival for how I earn my living.
Skynet might be fiction, but it’s coming for our jobs, anyway — and there’s no Kyle Reese traveling back in time to save us. Whatever it is we Genuine Intelligence creatures do next… not even AI can predict.
But I'm sure we'll figure it out.
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