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While flying back into the states from a sorely needed yet thoroughly exhausting vacation, the final hurdle between air travel tortures and public transit was customs. Going through US customs as a US citizen always irks me. In European countries, going through customs as a US citizen is, for me, going under the sign that says “Nothing to Declare” and leaving the airport. Then on my way back, I stand in three lines: One to scan my passport in a machine that gives me a questionnaire and a receipt, one to hand my ticket, receipt, and passport to a human for human scanning or whatever they’re supposed to do, and finally one to give my receipt to a security guard, is case I dropped out of the ceiling between the two human components of customs for the privilege of being caught leaving without a receipt.
The machine part of this trip needled my nicotine-deprived mood before I even got to it because my passport is broken. It’s coming up on retirement age, and has decided it is no longer interested in being scanned. This had led to a vacation full of hopeless sessions of rejection beeps, broken by a single successful scan executed by a humorless Italian witch as she ushered me out of her country. I approached the latest American mechanical deprivation assuming the worst.
It actually scanned on the first try this time (perhaps the witch’s spell was still active), and I got straight to the questionnaire, after a ten-second pause. Now it was just a vaguely unresponsive screen on an operating system that appeared to run on steam power.
Over the next three or four minutes answering questions and assuring the plastic box I was sure about my answers, I thought about how a human could have done it in a tenth of that time. I design interfaces for a living; a quick look around confirmed several people were having a much more difficult go of navigating the sticky, lagging touch screens.
Part of the nonsense is due to the way America has decided to flood international travel points with security mummery to ward off imaginary threats. The resulting tedious gauntlet then becomes overwhelming to the underpaid personnel, so America rolls up its Goodwill bin flight jacket sleeves and starts automating bits of bad system, because rethinking the assumptions that inform a broken system would cause the whole country to collapse.
Sure, the machines have more language options than your average American, and—for varying values of reliability—work without breaks or pay once installed. Twenty or so can be installed with minimum space requirements, eighteen might work on any given day, and abracadabra: efficiency!
I’ve come to the conclusion that the whatever book written in blood and bound in human skin that corporate boards use for reference has only one cabalistic word for the concepts of “efficient” and “cheap” and “offload to suckers” because I have not noticed anybody’s life getting more efficient over the years. For the overflowing swimming pools of greasy pearls clutched in the name of job creation, everybody in the business of creating jobs sure seems to look for any excuse to do the opposite, at everyone’s expense. The self-checkout machines at the supermarkets aren’t speeding up anyone’s shopping, but there sure are a lot fewer cashiers.1[1] Even the simplest things like waiting for the chip in my credit card to register takes more time than handing somebody a twenty.2[2] Not all examples are terrible or even bad, but it feels more like luck when they’re not, as the economic pressure on the transaction process is only nominally on the customer’s side and never on the employee’s.
This was on my mind as I quietly attended a video conference about possible uses for ChatGPT tech. It was a series of presentations in an open-ended format, little demos of rough drafts and proofs of concept. At random: one to help design a kitchen. It was cool. You could whip up a little kitchen and do a little walkthrough and make changes. Would the kitchen collapse if actually built? Probably not. Did the AI understand the concept of load-bearing walls? Unknown. Did it know what it would be like to actually work in the kitchen it built? 100 percent no. Would somebody trust it? Probably, unless they knew otherwise. Would they pay an expert who had these answers some hundreds of dollars instead of using a nearly-free AI tool? No chance. They might take the AI’s output to an actual expert who could correct things and know the right questions to ask, but the damage has been done, and a whole field begins to suffer, as the demand for entry-level expertise vanishes, gutting the growth of a profession at the root.
People are already losing their jobs. It’s not only the artists, whom nobody cares about until they’re gone, it’s copyeditors and clerks and designers. And just like self-checkouts and airport entry surveys, the humans are replaced by something a little bit worse. But it’s cheaper, and novelty often obscures indignity long enough for it to entrench, and we all accept that everything is a little bit slower, a little bit less trustworthy, and everything has a little more friction to grind us down over each day. The replacement bots could be honed into better tools, but who will bother once they’re accepted? Market trends always converge on giving us as little as possible.
I suspect my job will be okay for another five or ten years. Investigative journalism seems pretty safe. Most phone-related jobs are doomed. At some point in the near future an executive will type “can I use this technology to assign tasks to low-level employees?” into an AI assistant, which should make the entire ecology of middle management sit up. The luddites had a point: their profession was destroyed and replaced by something worse, for the benefit of fewer people. Mechanization was absolutely crushing to the working class and we spent a century clawing some rights and dignity back. We now live in an era where those rights are being actively stripped in the midst of another technological breakthrough.
At the risk of being called an alarmist, the assumptions in our system do need to be rethought, even at the risk of collapsing the country. As the art bots rush to crystalize our artistic culture, shipping more and more industries into imitation engines risks crystalizing the mechanisms that accelerate the exploitation inherent to capitalism. There is a very hard wall at the end of that road, and I shudder to think how many off-ramps we’re shutting down.
On the flip side, porn is about to get lit.
