AI, artificial intelligence, is big on the opinion pages, especially since ChatGPT has made some astounding claims. Some see it as the greatest opportunity since the alphabet and others as the end of the world. Reality lies somewhere between. Workers have felt threatened by progress at least since the invention of the power loom in 1784. Some disgruntled textile workers called Luddites were so upset they began smashing textile machinery. There were probably similar earlier revolts, but before Guttenberg’s press in 1440, with movable type, there was little communication of new labor-saving devices like the spinning wheel, or anything else. People were told what to believe, even ordered to.
When the author of Ecclesiastes, sometime BCE, wrote “There is nothing new under the sun.” He (I presume he, because a woman would have been ignored) was essentially correct; innovations came around, perhaps every hundred years. In most people’s lifetimes, they would not see anything new under the sun. Grandparents would have little to say that began “In my day.” Somewhere between Ecclesiastes and Guttenberg things started to really change.
Every invention has prophets and naysayers. Inventions put some people out of work. One printing press replaced thousands of scribes manually copying everything from the bible to advertisements, and probably pornography. It might take a monk’s entire lifetime to copy one book by hand with 13th century instruments. The goose quill pen did not come along until around the sixth century and was the preferred writing implement until the 19th . There wasn’t much reason to learn to read before the printing press because there was almost nothing to read but a few bibles jealously guarded by the clergy.
Textile machinery destroyed the cottage textile industry, but made new soft goods affordable to almost everyone. That increased the demand for cloth, requiring more mills, more mill workers, more cotton, and unfortunately more slaves for almost a century. Working conditions were poor by today’s standards. The assembly line displaced some skilled metalworkers, but changed the automobile from a luxury to the backbone of America’s economy. The automobile put many farriers out of business, but created work for mechanics and made all trades more productive and profitable. Steam shovels replaced picks and shovels, but made projects like the Panama Canal feasible. The canal employed tens of thousands then,and is Panama’s national industry.
In the middle twentieth century automation was cited as the enemy-of-labor, yet much of what we now take for granted is only possible with automation. If phone operators still had to connect calls by plugging in cables there would not be enough people in North America to handle the volume. Of course, if everyone was an operator there would be few calls to connect. The rock would hit the hard place. Instead, the system was automated, and telephones went from novelty to necessity.
Computers, it was said, would lead to a paperless society, but some consume more paper personally than ever because it’s so much easier to be an author of everything from magazine articles, to scholarly research, to pulp fiction. I have yet to see a computer drive a nail or hang drywall.
AI offers the same ultimate benefit as computers did. Tedious jobs get relegated to the computer and people take on more rewarding ones, one of which is deciding out of the endless drivel that AI computers (or infinite monkeys banging on infinite typewriters) can produce, which part is worth publishing. Professionals can use AI to try out 100 potential solutions, then proceed to refine the most promising, or least disturbing. Anything done by a machine, computer or AI is subject to the GIGO factor, garbage in, garbage out. It takes the part of the human brain called the amygdala to distinguish garbage from useful information, or distinguish good from bad, the legal definition of insanity.
Publishers, print or electronic need to re-earn our trust by fact checking and not allowing unsubstantiated content whether human or AI.
I first wrote this almost two weeks ago, but the artificial intelligence called Microsoft decided to delete the entire text. Word Autosave was turned on! It didn’t work anymore: beware. I think the lost original, written in a moment of inspiration, was better.
Ken Obenski is a forensic engineer, now safety and freedom advocate in South Kona. He writes a biweekly column for West Hawaii Today. Send feedback to obenskik@gmail.com