Dumb and Dumber
No Diggity
“There will come a point where no job is needed.“ is probably the most stupid thing Elon Musk has said in the last year (and that’s a pretty high bar, let’s be honest).
In a cringe-making interview by the UK’s gap year PM and would-be ‘Tech Bro’ RIshi Sunak, the billionaire Twitter-killer went on in much the same vein to say, “You can have a job if you want to have a job for personal satisfaction but the AI can do everything.”
After a lengthy deliberation of almost seconds, I came up with the following list of ‘jobs the AI won’t be doing’ -
Hairdressing
Nail Technician
Physiotherapist
Chef
Mixologist
Drain cleaner
Refuse disposal
Roofer
Gardener
Tree Surgeon
Pest Controller
Care Assistant
Architect
Builder
Carpenter
Musician
It’s almost as if Musk doesn’t live in the real world, isn’t it?
These are just jobs that I or my family have used in the past several months. I’m sure you could come up with many more. In fact, almost any point where we come into contact with the physical world, something happens that the AI won’t be doing.
This idea that technology can reduce our need to work is not a new one. John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that by this century the UK and US would have 15-hour weeks, due to the benefits of technology.
It hasn’t happened, has it? Instead, we seem to be working longer hours and even harder.
In his article and subsequent book, ‘Bullshit Jobs’, the late lamented David Graeber addresses this conundrum, noting that rather than a reduction in working hours we have seen huge growth in, “the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.”
This administrative sector is stuffed full of ‘Bullshit Jobs’, ones which have no reason to exist. Meanwhile, those jobs that have to exist, such as making things, repairing things, caring for people and the like, have been relentlessly squeezed. These ‘real’ jobs have remained at around 10% of the workforce over time, regardless of the changes in the rest of the mix.
Why is this so? Graeber again. “The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger.”
So the ruling class (of which Musk and Sunak are surely part) have created pointless jobs to keep us all occupied and pliant consumers of whatever they decide to sell us. Graeber identifies 5 types of Bullshit Job
“Flunkies,” are those paid to hang around and make their superiors feel important.
“Goons” are gratuitous or arms-race muscle.
“Duct tapers” are hired to patch or bridge major flaws that their bosses are too lazy or inept to fix systemically.
“Box tickers” go through various motions, often using paperwork or serious-looking reports, to suggest that things are happening when things aren’t.
“Taskmasters,” divided into two subtypes: unnecessary superiors, who manage people who don’t need management, and bullshit generators, whose job is to create and assign more bullshit for others.
None of these are going to be swept away by AI because their purpose is psychological. Empire builders will still want to build their empires to achieve power, status and, ultimately, money. Bosses will still want people to protect and boost their position.
Musk’s simplism completely ignores the psychology of organisations and power. It’s a kind of techo-infantilism, a child-like belief in technology to overcome humanity’s innate characteristics and flaws.
Whether this is a deliberate position or not is hard to conclude. Musk played his role in the interview, coming up with suitable soundbites that the public could digest (mostly because they contain nothing of any substance) and journalists could print unaltered. Is it because he really doesn’t understand the complexity or because it suits him to pretend he doesn’t? On recent evidence (i.e. at Twitter), it probably some of both, as he is a blend of sociopath and futurist.
What he doesn’t say is what the AI will do with us when we are not needed to work. Or rather, what the ruling class, the 1% who have 50% of the wealth, will tell it to do with us, when we are surplus to requirements.
That would have been a very interesting question to ask of both of them.
American Idiot
You really have to wonder if they’ve created a new type in Silicon Valley - not so much the ‘idiot savant’ as the ‘savant idiot’, a person who is considered intelligent but who’s utterances are unbelievably stupid and betray a complete lack of understanding of the real world.
And it’s like these savant idiots are competing with one another to be the most brainless and sociopathic. Here comes the latest entry from a long-time competitor in the field, Marc Andreessen, who has published a 5000-word wail of pity on his website that he titles, with customary self-effacement, the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”.
In this diatribe, he bemoans the unnecessary constraints placed on these heroes of the modern world - you know, tedious things like ethics, social responsibilty, sustainable development, risk management, trust and safety. These are stopping the technologists from doing what they are put on this earth for, to solve all of humanity’s problems with their wondrous technology. People like, er, Marc Andreessen and his fellow tech utopians. A line-up of the usual suspects - Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos et al.
For a thorough take-down of Andreesen’s pity party, you can read this excellent piece by Ed Zitron, who describes Andreesen’s thinking as “equal parts childish and outdated”. And that’s the best he has to say about it.
I don’t know about you but I am throroughly tired of hearing from these would-be ‘World Kings’, who think their huge wealth and particular (and very limited) type of intelligence put them in a position to decide the future of humanity. A humanity that, ironically, they have very little contact with and even less understanding, being almost to a man (and they are all men) lacking in basic interpersonal skills and normal things like empathy and compassion.
What annoys me even more is the paucity of their thought and their lack of intellectual rigour or even cohesive argument. They imagine themselves as Philosopher Kings but are intellectual pygmies driven by their own inadequacies.
And why are they such bloody victims all the time? They are like a clutch of pouting schoolchildren, whining that the world is ‘so unfair’ and you would know that if only you could see it from inside of one of their million-dollar mansions.
Andreesen, in particular, is culpable for much of the mess the tech industry is in. His breakthrough achievement was to co-design the Mosaic browser, the first widely available interface the World Wide Web. From that bright start he then created Netscape, a company that he hyped up to a ridiculous valuation and then sold to a gullible incumbent, AOL. Needless to say, the valuation was never realised but it started the whole ‘pump and dump’ approach to tech start-ups that mars the ecosphere even to this day, fuelling endless attempts to build the next Facebook/Insta/WhatsApp/Snapchat/pointless SM unicorn and hardly any coming up with the next cure for cancer or addressing any of the pressing issues pushing the world into existential crisis.
Andreesen, like his fellow idiots, also wants us to go and colonise other planets. The sooner he jumps in a rocket and goes to a new world, the better. Remember, in space, no one can hear you spout errant, self-serving bilge.
Fool On The Hill
AI mania still grips the world, much to the delight of our intrepid techno-futurists who see another opportunity to enslave parts of the population for their own ends. Not so much techno-optimism, more techno-feudalism. If you depend on the AI to live, then you depend on whoever owns the AI to live. Well, that’s OK, they’re such a warm-hearted and socially-conscious bunch, aren’t they?
I keep thinking the frenzy might abate but with so much land to be grabbed and so much money to be made, it’s a bit like hoping for peace and sanity in the middle of the Gold Rush. The latest product I’ve seen is what can only be described as an AI brooch. No doubt Apple are working on a link ups with Hermes and Cartier as we speak.
And so back to Musk and ridiculous things he said during Rishi Sunak’s job interview.
“I think we are seeing the most disruptive force in history here. We will have something for the first time that is smarter than the smartest human.”
This seems to represent a development in Musk’s own operating system as he now stringing together statements of utter stupidity into a stream-of-hyperbole that are beyond Jobs-level reality distortion.
Let’s take the first one - “I think we are seeing the most disruptive force in history here.” Well, if we look at actual history - you know, stuff that has already happened - there are quite a few candidates for ‘most disruptive force’ (not including actual humans who have managed to create the Anthropocene period, practically the definition of the most disruptive force you can imagine).
There was this bloke called Jesus Christ who had quite an impact, not to mention Allah and Prophet Mohammed. Then there was the Guttenberg Press, a kind of human-powered, analog Twitter platform. Personally, I’d put in a vote for the repeating rifle, which enabled the mass slaughter of bisons and other species, not to mention the colonisation and and enslavement of large swathes of the world.
Getting a bit more up-to-date, Fascism and the Hydrogen Bomb made quite a mark, taking humanity through the biggest armed conflict ever and right up to the brink of the apocalypse, which we still teeter on as I write this.
I’m always looking for a bit of participation here, so please send in your own nominations for ‘Most Disruptive Force In History’ and I’ll run a poll to pick the winner. Who knows, perhaps we’ll have an awards show and invite Space Karen along to announce the winner?
And so to the second one, “We will have something for the first time that is smarter than the smartest human.”
Well, that very much depends how you are defining ‘smart’ here. I suspect Musk has a very singular interpretation, which I would guess is “the way that I think”. In which case, he may very well be right. However, that’s not a comprehensive or widely accepted definition.
AI, as we have it now, is not actually intelligent. It is a wildly proficient sift-and-sort machine, that operates at a scale and speed most of us cannot comprehend. When we are faced with things we cannot comprehend, we make up stories. We anthropomorphise things, we attribute qualities to them that they do not possess. We turn them into something that is LIKE things we know, so we can fit them into our mental map of the world, because that is the process by which we build up our knowledge of the world (glad to see my first year option in Piagetian psychology proving useful at last.)
It seems appropriate to reference Arthur C. Clarke here, who said
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
AI fools us with a sleight of hand. We can’t see how the trick is done so we think it’s magic. It’s not, it’s just ones and noughts juggled around at mind-bending speed.
AI is a crude automaton of the human brain. It does not even begin to encompass creativity, compassion, spirituality and all the parts of intelligence that exist outside of the brain, beyond comprehension or even description, possibly beyond our world as we understand it.
I think Musk wants to believe it is intelligent but I am sure he wants US to believe it is intelligent. He’s a savant idiot, which makes him a danger to himself and everyone else.
I love hearing from my subscribers so please comment on the post, in Notes, or email me at colin@colinnewlyn.com.
I’ve also had some lovely chats with some of you, so if you’d like to talk then book a call on my Calendly page. I’m particularly interested in hearing about your experiences in workplaces that need decrapfying!
Captain Of Your Ship
Did I tell you I know a real pirate?
No, not someone who has been inspired by ‘Be More Pirate’ but a real, sea-going, rule-bending, sailing-close-to-the-wind (literally and metaphorically) Pirate.
I met Captain Tonz at a ‘Be More Pirate’ Meetup (on a pirate ship, of course) and he is very much part of the BMP community. He’s someone who has lived his life by the Pirate ethos, and quite a life it has been.
And now it’s being captured in a brilliant podcast, “Original Pirate Material”, where Captain Tonz tells his story in tasty 20 minute chunks. Each one is a juicy little morsel that will leave you wanting more. In the process, he lays out his philosophy for life and how he has lived by it.
Available on all your favourite podcast platforms!
(As is the wonderful ‘Work Punks’ pod that yours truly does with Paul Jansen and Ben Simpson)