An incident which struck me at the time as quite amusing occurred not long since on North Broad street. A steam shovel at work had attracted a large number of spectators, including two Irishmen, who, judging by their appearance, were toilers temporarily out of employment.
As the big shovel at one lick scooped up a whole cartload of dirt and dumped it upon a gondola car, one of the Irishmen remarked: “What a shame, to think of them digging up dirt in that way!” “What do ye mane?” asked his companion. “Well,” said the other, “that machine is taking the bread out of the mouths of a hundred laborers who could do the work with their picks and shovels.” “Right you are, Barney,” said the other fellow.
Just then a man who had been looking on and who had overheard the conversation remarked: “See here, you fellows. If that digging would give work to a hundred men with shovels and picks, why not get a thousand men and give them teaspoons with which to dig up the dirt?” The Irishmen, to their credit, saw the force of the remark and the humor of the situation and joined heartily in the laugh that followed, and one of them added: “I guess you’re right, Captain. The scoop’s the thing after all.” —Philadelphia Public Ledger, 1901
AI is credited with putting thousands of "information workers" out of their jobs. The wailing and gnashing-of-teeth is deafening.
One characteristic that makes those jobs vulnerable to AI is that what we now consider "knowledge work" is almost entirely visual in nature. The dominance of visual information is an artifact of the economics of printing (cheap ink on cheap paper or even cheaper pixels illuminated or not illuminated). The recursive nature of the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next repeatedly discounted what was not visual and repeatedly placed a premium on what was visual.
Over time, knowledge or information that didn't conveniently compress down to static, 2-dimensional visual reproduction became (almost) extinct. Our entire worth has been reduced to our ability to take standardized tests with multiple choices and "completely filling out the correct circle with a #2 pencil"*.
I submit that any information that could not be easily rendered as a two-dimensional visual was dismissed as "not knowledge". This continues to be reinforced by the elites who attained their power, at least in part, by their ability to prove mastery of 2-D, visual information.
If your job is involves processing "visual" (or audio) data and sorting through a finite number of predetermined outcomes, then your extremely vulnerable to being replaced by AI. If you are a bureaucrat whose prime "deliverable" is to approve or reject requests (permits) or to push information at bored students, then you should be upgrading your skills because you are about to be replaced.
Not all knowledge is like that
I recall walking through a factory and unexpectedly feeling warmth on my right cheek. I stopped walking and held my hands up and found the specific power transfer panel that was radiating the heat. I then called an electrician on my walkie-talkie and he was able to fix the issue during the next production break.
A good auto mechanic can tell if you have a coolant leak or if your vehicle is overheating just by the way your vehicle smells.
In another case an engineer who was reviewing a crashed vehicle saw bolt threads impressed into steel chassis parts. That was enough to start an investigation into the repair history of the vehicle and the cause of the crash was ascertained to be an improperly executed repair.
I know that a couple of my readers are/were "welding engineers". They are always looking at the weld caps for signs of hard-water deposits, a sign of poor cooling. They look for wear on the paint of robots which can be a sign or robot dress rubbing against them. They look for heat-marks on the work-piece that can be a sign of unplanned current paths shunting heat away from the weld.
The point is that curious humans have the ability to incorporate unexpected information and entertain answers that are not pre-programmed. That is why people get frustrated with automated customer service phone lines. Either their problem is not pre-programmed or the path to the problem is sign-posted in jargon that is not meaningful to the customer.
Today's work-ticket
Collect 100 Channel Catfish and stock them in a pond. I will be spending a bunch of time in a vehicle today.
Quicksilver Musical Moment
Power in the Blood (requested by Quicksilver's mother). Apparently, Quicksilver likes to sing along with this song.
*OK, I realize that standardized tests are not done on the computer and many of them are interactive in the sense that the number of questions depend on where you fall in the bell-curve. If you are in the tails of the curve then you get relatively few questions. If you are between 40th percentile and 60th percentile you have to answer a LOT of questions to get the resolution needed for PASS/NOPASS decisions.
100 Catfish!?!?! You must mean to trap or net a bunch of young ones I assume? Can you purchase farm-raised fingerlings at the co-ops up there? The fish-truck comes around once or twice a year down here. Tilapia, trout, all sorts of choices. From what I've been told, the wildlife and birds really do appreciate the diversity of cuisine on offer.
ReplyDeleteI had trapped a bunch of fingerlings in a bait-trap down in the creek behind me, moved them to a neighbors new pond. He said the heron's were vigilant, but snagged them all in a couple weeks. LOL!
Purchased from a fish-farm. 100, 4"-to-8" fish for $150.
DeleteThey were released into a body of water that already has multiple species of fish, so I am not too worried about the herons and iggles getting all of them.
Will AI be able to pass the smell test, or the weld burn test, or the rub test? Woody
ReplyDeleteOnce engineers program the correct metrics into the optical scanner, the answer is yes.
DeleteConsider the bottling line of even 30 years ago. Employee s sitting staring at rilled and capped bottles back lit by a white board.
Today sealed containers whiz by optical scanners at breathtaking speed. Any defect gets the container rapidly kicked off the line.
All the machinery, of the greatest precision, none would work as desired until properly programmed.
AI not needed for these menial but necessary jobs.
I remember having my toolbox painted UAW Traitor because of improvements I made when at GM.
DeleteThose improvements helped make the plant more viable to stay open in a time when many were closing.
Pruning the vine.
My first thought with the "100 Catfish" was a busy day with a cast net but that would not work sitting in a vehicle unless you were driving from spot to spot.
ReplyDeleteGood luck!
I put 100 channel catfish fingerlings in the pond here at the house this spring - a neighbor whom I had given permission to fish, years ago, had caught out all but one of the catfish that were in the pond when we bought the property.
ReplyDeleteThankfully, this year we have what would otherwise be a troubling overgrowth of filamentous algae that is hopefully providing some degree of cover against the frequent visits of great blue herons.
While waiting in line at the fish truck, one fellow told me that the bald eagles have all but eliminated all the catfish from his pond - many of them too large for the birds to carry away, so they just eat them right there on the bank.
It was what a short five years ago that the recently unemployed were told to learn how to code.
ReplyDeleteAnd now those same who sniffed at the blue collar workers are threatened. tsk tsk
ERJ, I am not sure it is always as cut and dried as that.
ReplyDeleteIn my line of work (Quality Assurance), there is certainly an aspect of "2-D" knowledge. There is also the aspect of the practice that AI will never be able to replicate; I have often referred to what I do as much of an art as a science. AI can replicate the 2-D knowledge or art, but I suspect it cannot manage the nuances that make human endeavors work.
I think the Irish chaps were right. The problem with the spoons response is that it’s assuming the thing to be maximized should be the dirt-removal efficiency, when it should be human flourishing. A spade is the optimal tool for a single man to be effective, productive, and meaningful. A spoon is ridiculous, because it makes a mockery of the man’s capacity.
ReplyDeleteMankind was created to work, and a goal of society is to give all its members an opportunity to meaningfully participate in the community. The drive for efficiency and productivity at the expense of participation (while at the same time financializing all society so the unemployable cannot provide for themselves) becomes monstrous.
I must disagree about the "goal of society". You appear to believe that a society is not an animate being. But it is not. It cannot have goals and it owes nobody anything other than to recognize and not violate the natural rights of each individual person.
DeleteEvery time I hear something like this, I remember the old song "Peg and Awl" about the early 1800's when hundreds of thousands of shoemakers were put out of work by invention of a machine to make dozens of shoes a day, rather than shoemakers making a shoe a day on the bench. Same concept, different mechanism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iWsFlHS0L8
ReplyDelete"Recession is when a neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours"
ReplyDeleteRonald Reagan, President
Reagan’s line works because it yanks an abstract economic cycle out of the policy realm and drops it into the living room. “Recession” and “depression” are usually treated like technical weather reports: indicators, charts, and distant pain. He reframes them as a moral distance problem. When it’s your neighbor, hardship can be acknowledged, even pitied, without requiring sacrifice. When it’s you, the economy stops being a news story and becomes a crisis of identity, status, and control.
Unemployment to those that WANT TO WORK isn't just loss of pay, it's personal.
Unemployment and hyperinflation created by uncontrolled Money Printing created Weimar Germany.
Agreed. And I have a huge gripe with AI in that - as our Esteemed Blog Host notes… that we are in very, very big trouble when we let our tools do our thinking for us. The new tradesmen coming up are not old world tradesmen. The old journeymen and masters could think. The new breed are installers. They’re great in cookie cutter, assembly line installations but stall when confronted with unusual or new stuff crops up.
DeleteOur graduates are using AI to write papers and assignments for them too. This isn’t good. At all…