Llewellyn King: Will AI be mankind’s greatest adventure so far? There’s hope and fear
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, in Cambridge, Mass. Its architecture can produce some of the anxiety that goes with the AI revolution. We’re in an increasingly strange world.
Some ways in which an advanced misaligned AI could try to gain more power.
Hit this link for video on the birth of artificial intelligence, whose founding as a discipline happened at Dartmouth College back in the summer of 1956.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
A new age in the human experience on Earth is underway. It is an age of change as profound — and possibly more so — than the Industrial Revolution with the steam engine introducing the concept of post-animal labor, known as shaft horsepower.
Artificial intelligence in this new age is infiltrating in all areas of human endeavor.
Some things, it will change totally, like work: It will end much menial work and a whole tranche of white-collar jobs. Some it will enhance our lives beyond imagination, such as in medicine and associated longevity.
Some AI will threaten, some it will annihilate.
It will test our understanding of the truth in what has become a post-fact world. The veracity of every assertion will be subject to investigation, from what happened in history to current election results. It will end much menial work and a whole tranche of white-collar jobs.
At the center of the upheaval in AI is electricity. It is the one essential element — the obedient ingredient — for AI.
Electricity is essential for the computers that support AI. But AI is putting an incalculable strain on electric supply.
The United States Energy Association, at its annual meeting, learned that a search on Google today uses a tenth of the electricity as the same search on ChatGPT.
Across the world, data centers are demanding an increasing supply of uninterruptible electricity 24/7. Utilities love this new business, but they fear that they won’t be able to service it going forward.
Fortunately AI is a valuable tool for utilities, and they are beginning to employ it increasingly in their operations, from customer services to harnessing distributed resources in what are called virtual power plants, to such things as weather prediction, counting dead trees for fire suppression, and mapping future demand.
Electricity is on the verge of a new age. And new technologies, in tandem with the relentless growth in AI use, are set to overhaul our expectations for electricity generation and increase demand for it.
Fusion power, small modular reactors, viable flexible storage in the form of new battery technology and upgraded old battery technology, better transmission lines, doubling the amount of power that can be moved from where it is made to where it is desperately needed are all on the horizon, and will penetrate the market in the next 10 years.
Synchronizing new demand with new supply is yet to happen, but electricity provision is on the march as inexorably as is AI. Together they hold the keys to a new human future.
A new book by Omar Hatamleh, a gifted visionary, titled This Time It’s Different, lifts the curtain on AI. Hatamleh, who is chief AI officer for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Md., says, “This time, it truly is different … Witness AI’s awakening, revealing its potential for both awe-inspiring transformation and trepidation.”
Hatamleh organized NASA’s first symposium on AI on June 11 at Goddard. Crème de la crème in AI participants came from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Qantm AI, Boeing and JP Morgan.
The consensus view was, to my mind, optimistically expressed by Pilar Manchon, Google’s senior director of AI, who said she thought that this was the beginning of humankind’s greatest adventure. The very beginning of a new age.
A bit of backstage criticism was that the commercial pressure for the tech giants to get to market with their generative AI products has been so great that they have been releasing them before all the bugs have been ironed out — hence some of the recent ludicrous search results, like the one from this question, “How do you keep the cheese on pizza?" The answer, apparently, was with “glue.”
However, these and other hallucinations won’t affect the conquering march of AI, everyone agreed.
Government regulation? How do you regulate something that is metamorphosing second by second?
A word about Hatamleh: I first met him when he was chief engineering innovation officer at NASA in Houston. He was already thinking about AI in his pursuit of off-label drugs to treat disease, and his desire to cross-reference data to find drugs and therapies that worked in one situation, but hadn’t been tried in another, especially cancer. This is now job No. 1 for AI.
During Covid, he wrangled 73 global scientists to produce a seminal report in May 2020, “Never Normal,’' which predicted with eerie accuracy how Covid would affect how we work, play, socialize and how life would change. And it has. A mere foretaste of AI?
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Llewellyn King: What made me an AI enthusiast.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I have gone over. All the way. I have fallen in love with artificial intelligence. We need it, and I’m on board.
My conversion was sudden. It happened on one memorable day, Feb. 8, 2023. It was a sudden strike in a well-worn heart by Cupid’s arrow.
My love life with technology has been either unrequited or messy. I was always the one who blew the relationship, I admit that.
It started with computer typesetting. I was a committed hot-lead-type man. I didn’t want to see that painted lady, computer technology, destroying my divine relationship with hot type. But she did and when I tried to make amends, she was, er, cold, froze me out.
Likewise, as an old-time newspaperman, I was very proficient and happy with Telex. Computer technology separated us.
The worst of all was my first encounter with the internet.
I was pursuing the story of nuclear fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California. A lab technician tried to interest me in the new device he was using to send messages: the Internet. I blew it off. “That is just Telex on steroids,” I said.
Ms. Internet doesn’t care to be scorned and she nearly cost me my manhood — well, my publishing company — when she took her terrible revenge. She killed print papers as well as hot type. She was a vengeful siren that way.
My conversion to AI began innocently enough. I was listening to a reporter on National Public Radio explaining how Microsoft’s new AI search engine would not only change the world of online searching but would also give Google a serious run for its money — billions of dollars, I might say parenthetically.
The writing's on the wall for Google unless it can get its AI to market fast. I was intrigued.
The illustration used by NPR reporter Bobby Allyn was that of buying a couch and carrying it home in your car. The new search engine, Allyn explained, will tell you if the couch you want to buy will fit in your car. It will know the dimensions of the car and, maybe, of the couch too. Wow!
Then I went on to watch a wild, unruly hearing before the U.S. House Oversight Committee. A long-suffering panel of former Twitter executives faced some pointed abuse from the Republican members. Some of those members never got to pose a question: Their time was entirely taken up castigating the witnesses over alleged collusion with the Biden administration and over Hunter Biden’s laptop — the holy grail for conspiracy theorists. It was a performance worthy of a Soviet show trial.
The worst aspects of the new House were on display. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.) was visibly flustered because she wasn’t in her seat when her time to question the witnesses arrived. She rushed back to it and was so excitable that she was nearly incoherent.
Then there was Marjorie Taylor Greene (R.-Ga.), who was adamant that Twitter was advancing a political agenda by accepting the science that vaccines helped control the COVID-19 outbreak. She asserted that Twitter had a political objective when it denied her free-speech rights by suspending her account, after frequent warnings about her dangerous public health positions opposing vaccinations.
The lady's not for turning. Not by facts, anyway. That was clear. Any Southern charm she may possess was shelved in favor of invective. She told the former Twitter executives that she was glad they had been fired.
The clincher in my conversion to AI had nothing to do with the brutal thrashing of the experts, but with the explanation by Yoel Roth, former head of Trust and Safety at Twitter, who with forbearance explained that there were then and are now hundreds of Russian false accounts on Twitter aimed at influencing our elections and reaching deeply into our politics. Likewise, Iranian and Chinese accounts.
That is when it occurred to me: AI is the answer. Not the answer to the mannerless ways of the House hearing, but to the whole vulnerability of social media.
We have to fight cyber excess with cyber: Only AI can deal with the volumes of malicious domestic and foreign material on the net. Too bad it won’t resolve the free-speech issues, or the one that emerged at the House hearing: the right to lie without restraint.
This AI doubter is now an enthusiast. Bring it on.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington. D.C.
George McCully: We need to battle AI robotization
From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)
Every reader of this journal is being affected by the highly exceptional historical phenomenon we are all experiencing: an age of total transformation, of paradigm-shifts in virtually every field of human endeavor. Our own field—postsecondary education and training—is just one among all the others. Younger colleagues, though they may not like it, are experiencing this as a given and generally constructive condition, building their future theaters of operations. Senior colleagues raised and entering the profession in the 20th Century paradigm of “higher education,” experience current transformations as disruptive—disintegrative and destructive of their originally sought-for and later accustomed professional world. Students seeking credentials for future jobs are confused and problematically challenged.
It helps to understand all this turmoil as an inexorable historical process. This article will describe that process, and then address how we individually, and organizations like NEBHE, might best deal with it.
We happen to be living in a very rare kind of period in Western history, in which everything is being radically transformed at once. Paradigm-shifts in particular fields happen frequently, but when all fields are in paradigm-shifts simultaneously, it is an Age of Paradigm Shifts. This has happened only three times in Western history, about a thousand years apart—first with the rise of Classical Civilization in ancient Greece; second with the fall of Rome and the rise of medieval Christianity; and third in the “early modern” period—when the Renaissance of Classicism, the Reformation of Christianity, the Scientific Revolution, the Age of Discovery, the rise of nation states, secularization and the Enlightenment, cumulatively replaced medieval civilization and gave birth to “modern” history in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Modernity, however, is now unraveling, in a transformation with significant unique features.
First and most noticeable is its speed, occurring in a matter of decades (since circa 1990) rather than centuries. The acceleration of change in history, driven by technology’s increasing pace and power, has been going on for centuries—perhaps first noticed by Machiavelli in the Renaissance. Today, the driving transformational force is the rapidly accelerating innovations in digital and internet technology, in particular, increasingly autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Second, for the first time our technology is increasingly acknowledged to be running ahead of human control; it is becoming autonomous and self-propelled, and we are already struggling to catch up with it.
Third, whereas the first three transformations were intended by human agents, for the first time now, driven by technological advances, we have no clue as to where the technology is headed—what will be the dénouement or if that is even possible.
And fourth, under these conditions of constant change both internally and all around us, strategic planning in any traditional sense is impossible because there are no solid handles we can grasp and hold onto as collaborators or guides into the future. We are adrift in an unprecedently tumultuous sea of change.
For people in post-secondary education and training, this critical situation is especially agonizing because we are in society at various thresholds of adulthood, where personal and professional futures are crucially chosen and determined. We have extraordinarily heavy responsibility for the futures of individuals, of society, of humanity and of our planet—precisely when we have inadequate competence, coordination and self-confidence. We are where humans will address the innovations and disruptions critical to the future, where strategic knowledge and intelligence will be most needed, and where historical understanding will therefore be crucial.
Let us first acknowledge that each, and all, of our jobs sooner or later, can and probably will be robotized by AI. Its technical capacity already exists, noted by many journalists and scholars, for thinking and writing (publicly available GPT-3, and next year GPT-4), visual and musical arts, interactive conversations, cerebral games (chess, Go, et al.) and other problem-solving activities, at quality levels equal to and frequently excelling human-generated work. Significant technological advances are happening almost weekly, and AI nowadays develops these autonomously, written in code it developed for its own machine-learning use. Its aims are not excellence, truth or other value-intensive products, but common-denominator performances adequate to compete commercially with works created by humans and indistinguishable (by humans—though software is being developed intended do this) from them, produced at blinding speed. Suddenly there could appear countless new “Bach” fugues, novels in Hemingway’s style, etchings by Rembrandt, news articles and editorials or academic work—all mass-produced by machines.
Administrative functions—numerary, literary, interactive, decision-making, etc.—will be widely available to ordinary individuals and institutions. What will remain for which humans are needed to do, at prices that yield living wages, is a real question already being considered hypothetically.
Speed bumps helping to shield us from faster robotization are (temporarily at least) the availability of sufficient capitalization, and the time required for dissemination. Here, the fact that we work much more slowly than AI is a temporary but ultimately self-defeating blessing. The driving incentive for takeover is the robots’ greater cost-effectiveness. In the long run, robots work more cheaply and much faster than humans, outweighing losses of quality in performance.
For individuals, our best defense against robotic takeover is for each of us to identify and enhance whatever aspects of our jobs that humans can still do best, which means that we should all start redefining our work in humanistic and value-intensive directions, so that when robotization comes knocking, decision-makers will go for the low-hanging fruit, allowing the easiest transitions first, leaving some margins of continued freedom for humans to continue doing their jobs.
A clear possibility, and I believe necessity, for postsecondary education and training lies in that distinction, extending from individuals’ lives and work to institutions and organizations like NEBHE and their instruments such as this journal. The rise of machine learning (AI) is a wedge, compelling us to cease referring to all post-secondary teaching and learning as “higher education.” There is nothing “higher” about robotic training and commercial credentialing for short-term “gig economy” job markets. Let us therefore first define our terms more carefully and precisely.
“Education,” as in “liberal education,” traditionally means “self-development”; “training” customarily means “knowledge and skills development.” The two are clearly distinct, but not separate except in extreme cases; when mixed, the covering designation depends on which is primary and intentional in each particular case.
In other words, our education helps define who we are; our training helps define what we are—doctor, lawyer, software engineer, farmer, truckdriver, manufacturer, etc. Who we are is an essential and inescapable part of all of our lives that’s always with us; what we are is optional—what we chose to do and be at given times of our lives.
Education is intrinsically humanistic and value-intensive, therefore most appropriately (but not necessarily) taught and learned between humans; training can be well-taught by AI, imparting knowledge and skills from robots to humans. Ideally, to repeat for emphasis, both education and training usually involve each other in varying proportions—when education includes knowledge and skills development, and training is accompanied by values. But these days especially, we should be careful not to confuse them.
For individuals, certainly education and possibly training are continuing lifelong pursuits. AI will take over training most easily and first, especially as rapid changes and transformations overtake every field, already producing a so-called “gig” economy in which work in any given capacity increasingly becomes temporary, more specialized and variegated, affecting the lives and plans of young employees today. Rapid turnover requires rapid increases in training, certifying, credentialing programs and institutions. Increasing demand for it has evoked many new forms of institutionalization—e.g., online and for-profit in addition to traditional postsecondary colleges and universities—as well as an online smorgasbord of credentials for personal subscriptions. For all of these, AI offers optimal procedures and curricula, increasingly the only way to keep up with exploding demand; thus, the proliferation of kinds of institutions, programs, curricula, courses and credentials is sure to continue.
The need for education will also increase, so the means of delivery and content in such a disturbed environment will require extraordinarily innovative creativity, resilience and agile adaptability among educators. The highest priority will have to be keeping up with the transformations—figuring out how best to insert the cultivation of humane values, best accomplished between human teachers (scholars, professors, practitioners) and learners, and provided by educational institutions and individuals, into the many new forms of training. Ensuring that this happens will be a major responsibility of today’s educational infrastructure and personnel, because AI does not, and does not have to, care about values. Will individual learners care? Not necessarily—for consumers of credentials, personal and even professional values apart from their commercial value are not a top priority. Whether employers will care about them is a major issue for concern by educators.
Here, the paradigm-shift in post-secondary education and training arises for attention by umbrella organizations like, for example, NEBHE and this journal. When NEBHE was founded, in 1955, the dominant paradigm in post-secondary education was referred to simply as “higher” education” (the “HE” in those acronyms)—residing in liberal arts colleges (including community colleges) and universities. The New England governors, realizing that the future prosperity of our region would be heavily dependent on “higher” education, committed their states to the shared pursuit of academic excellence in which New England was arguably the national leader.
That simple paradigm, however, has been superseded in practice. Today, the much greater variety of institutional forms and procedures, much more heavily reliant on rapidly developing technology, and the recognized need for broader inclusion of previously neglected and disadvantaged populations, calls for reconceptualization and rewording, reflecting the broader new reality of post-secondary, lifelong, continuing education and training.
New England is no longer the generally acknowledged national leader in this proliferation; the paradigm-shifting is a nationwide phenomenon. Nonetheless, though the rationale for a New England regional umbrella organization for both educational and training infrastructure has been transformed, it persists. Now it is needed to help the two branches of post-secondary human and skills development work in mutually reinforcing ways, despite the challenges—which are accelerating and growing—for both branches. Lifelong continuing education and training will be enriched, strengthened and refined by their complementary collaboration for all demographic constituencies.
How this might happen among an increasing variety of institutions still needs to be worked out in this highly fluid and dynamic environment. That is the urgent challenging mission and responsibility of the umbrella organizations. At the ground-level, individual professionals need to be reassessing their jobs defensively in humanistic directions, for which they will be fortified with a strategic sense of mission as a crucial element in the comprehensive infrastructure. Beyond that, coordinated organization will help form multiple alliances among institutions in a united front against encroaching AI robotization. This may be the only pathway for retaining roles and responsibilities by humans into the future.
George McCully is a historian, former professor and faculty dean at higher education institutions in the Northeast, professional philanthropist and founder and CEO of the Catalogue for Philanthropy.
Jim Hightower: You'll have to give self-driving cars the right of way
Inside a Tesla self-driving car.
Via OtherWords.org
With chaos in the White House, worsening climate disasters, more wars than we can count, and a wobbling economy here at home, the last thing we need is another big challenge. But — look out! — here comes a doozy!
It’s AI — artificial intelligence — the fast-evolving science of autonomous machines that can think, learn and even reproduce themselves.
Consider self-driving vehicles. Once the stuff of science fiction, the future is suddenly upon us, with Google, Daimler, and GM rolling out driverless taxis, commercial trucks, and even cars with no steering wheel or gas and brake pedals.
An army of corporate lobbyists is rushing to legislative halls, literally changing the rules of the road to allow full deployment of these vehicles.
What about the hundreds of thousands of professional drivers who’ll lose their jobs? Not our problem, say the financiers and AI barons who’d profit from a mass bot-mobile conversion. Besides, as AI champion David Autor coldly asserts, those drivers get sick, take vacations, etc. “People are messy,” he notes; “machines are straightforward.”
Indeed, so straightforward that these two-ton, non-sentient “drivers” will be driving straight at a world of defenseless pedestrians. Already, one of Uber’s experimental cars killed an Arizona pedestrian last year.
We can fix that, says Andrew Ng, a prominent AI investor: They just have to be reprogrammed.
By “they,” Ng doesn’t mean the self-driving machines — he means pedestrians! “Please be lawful,” he scolds, “and please be considerate” of the computer-driven vehicles. Give right-of-way to the new technology!
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer and public speaker.
Llewellyn King: For neckties and against AI, airline bosses and hedge funds in 2019
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
No New Year’s resolutions this year. Nary a one. Instead I am throwing myself, body and soul, into campaigns -- campaigns designed to halt the slide in civilized life.
Here are my campaigns:
1. Rescue the necktie: More and more men are going around naked about the throat but wearing a pocket square. Now I love pocket squares, very useful if you should meet one of those famous actresses who is always in tears. Whip it out, get it soaked and presto! It goes on eBay.
The thing is that neckties are disappearing. Only businessmen on the perp walk and some politicians wear them. Even former President Barack Obama appears to have abandoned them almost entirely -- a serious regression.
Ties are important. They conceal protruding Adam’s apples, turkey necks and dirty shirt fronts. Also, they are used to wipe eyeglasses and to twirl when listening to people who go on and on.
2. I am pushing to get airline executives to ride “basic coach” on at least one 10-hour flight. They will learn that they are the agents of physical cruelty and weird perversity.
They have ordained travel without luggage because the fees for luggage on “basic” are so high you would be paying for another class of service if you take a suitcase.
The airline bosses should be squeezed into the amazing shrinking toilets (too small for grownups); they should have their knees in their faces and have to sit up as straight as a drill sergeant. They should then try to stand up after hours of contortion.
3. I want a punitive tax for banks who will not speak to you but will put you through hours of automated telephone hell, in the hope that you will give up and leave them alone (with your money and their fees with which they steal that money).
4. Hedge funds that shred the lives of workers and deny customer service in the name of “shareholder value” should be prosecuted for hate speech for those words. “Shareholder value” can be roughly translated as “We’re going to screw you.” How about “customer value” or a little “social value”?
You have been on the line for hours and are begging the artificial-intelligence recording to let you hear a live human voice, even if it is originating from a faraway country and its owner is speaking English as a third language. The machine says, “Do you want to hear the main menu again?” You slide to the floor, defeated, crazed and suicidal.
I want it to be a federal crime to have a machine with a woman’s voice. They are cursed routinely with foul expletives that even a machine should not have to hear, let alone one that thinks it is a woman. #MeToo should get on this one and demand that the programmer gets the sack without pension.
5. I will be working for honesty from automated systems. I do not want my computer to “welcome” me when I turn it on. I believe that it does not care, that it is not sincere and that it is, to this point in time, inanimate and has no feelings. Therefore, when machines say things like “Have a nice day,” even “thank you,” they are lying.
This will change as artificial intelligence is given artificial emotions and machines talk to us in ways so crafty we will not know whether it is a machine or a person. We may not even know if the damned thing has captured the affections of our loved ones. Some states still have an “alienation of affections” common law tort that allows the thwarted lover to sue for stolen love.
Already, you may have a good case for filing a lawsuit against Facebook for running off with your children. Albeit in plain sight.
Happy New Year.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Llewellyn King: Perils and promise of artificial intelligence
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about; but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.
I feel close to Omar Khayyam, the great 11th-Century Persian poet and mathematician, not just because of his fondness for a drink, but also because of his search for meaning, which took him in "The Rubaiyat" to “Doctor and Saint” and then out "by the same Door as in I went.”
I’ve been looking at artificial intelligence (AI) and I feel, like Omar, that I’m coming away from talking with leaders in the field as unenlightened as when I started this quest.
The question is simple: What will it do to us, our jobs and our freedom?
The answer isn’t clear: Even those who are enthusiastic about the progress they’re making with AI are privately alarmed about its consequences. And they worry about how far some corporations will push it too hard and too fast.
The first stages are already active, although surreptitiously. The financial technology (fintech) world has been quick to embrace AI. Up for a bank loan? Chances are you’ll be approved or turned down by a form of AI which checked your employment, credit score and some other criteria (unknown to you) and weighed your ability to repay. Some anomaly, maybe a police report, may have come into play. You’ll be told the ostensible reason for your rejection, if that’s the case, but you may never know it.
The two overriding concerns: what AI will do to our jobs and our privacy.
If jobs are the problem, governments can help by insisting that some work must be done by human beings: reserved occupations. Not a pretty concept but a possible one.
When it comes to privacy, governments are likely to be the problem. With surreptitious bio-identification surveillance, the government could know every move you make -- your friends, your business associates, your lovers, your comings and goings -- and then make judgments about your fitness for everything from work to liberty. No sin shall go unrecorded, as it were.
This one isn’t just a future worry, it’s nearly here. The Chinese, I’m told, have run an experiment on citizen fitness using AI.
Historically, at least in literature, we’ve been acculturated to the idea of man-made monsters out of control, whether it was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But the mythology probably has been around since man thought he could control life.
On jobs, the future is unclear. Until this point in time, automation has added jobs. British weaver Ned Ludd and his followers, who smashed up the looms of the Industrial Revolution, got it wrong. Nowadays cars are largely made by machines, as are many other things, and we have near full employment. Such fields as health care have expanded, while adding technology at a fast pace. AI opens new vistas for treatment. Notoriously difficult-to-diagnose diseases, like Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, might be easily identified and therapies suggested.
But think of a farm being run by AI. It knows how to run the tractor and plow, plant and harvest. It can assay the acidity of the soil and apply a corrective. If it can do all that, and maybe even decide what crops will sell each year, what will it do to other employment?
In the future AI will be taught sensitivity, even compassion, with the result that in many circumstances, like customer assistance, we may have no idea whether we’re dealing with a human or AI aping one of us. It could duplicate much human endeavor, except joining the unemployment line.
I’ve visited MIT, Harvard and Brown, and I’ve just attended a conference at NASA, where I heard some of the leading AI developers and critics talk about their expectations or fears. A few are borne along by enthusiasm, some are scared, and some don’t know, but most feel -- as I do, after my AI tour -- that the disruption that AI will bring will be extreme. Not all at once, but over time.
Like Omar, I came away not knowing much more than when I began my quest. "The Rubaiyat" (which means quatrains) is a paean to drink. At least no one suggested machines will be taking to the bottle, but I may.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Llewellyn King: Thinking machines will replace innumerable skilled jobs
Consider it as the work dichotomy.
There is a shortage in the millions for skilled labor jobs in the United States. The country is desperate for men and women who drive trucks, operate machines, weld, wield hammers – or can fill skilled jobs in dozens of categories, from bulldozer operator to utility lineman.
Bill Hillman, chief executive officer of the National Utility Contractors Association, the organization that represents contractors (people who do everything, from replacing electricity poles to working down manholes to operating heavy equipment), says getting help is a major problem for his members. So they are setting up training programs and working with schools and community colleges.
But these also are some of the people who could be jobless due to artificial intelligence (AI) in the near future. Thomas Kochan, co-director of the MIT Sloan Institute for Work and Employment Research, told me this “middle of the labor market” is coming under attack by AI deployment.
John Savage, professor of computer science at Brown University, foresees a need for major retraining of workers with the spread of AI. But he told me he is “optimistic”: He sees major displacements but new opportunities.
Displacement is a worry for workers, but so is job quality deterioration in the so-named gig economy or freelance economy: a volatile labor pool where the employer holds most of the cards.
Gig workers are spread among diverse occupation groups: arts and design, computer and information technology, media and communication, transportation and material moving, construction and extraction. They are working here and there without permanence, medical insurance or pension provisions, like employer 401(k) contributions.
That is for starters and it is happening now. Then comes the apocalypse when millions of workers find themselves displaced by thinking machines. Think of what happened to elevator operators in cities when elevators were automated.
The first to go might be taxi drivers, some truck drivers, airline pilots and others in transportation. Already in Phoenix, you can ride in a robot taxi operated by Waymo, the Google self-driving car project. Truck makers, stirred on by potential competition from new entrants, like Tesla, are hard at perfecting autonomous intercity trucks.
To my mind, the issue is not whether but when. There are more than 3 million truck drivers on U.S. roads. Not all will be displaced by AI, but if 1 million go, there will be considerable downward pressure on wages.
Traditionally, and Savage points this out, automation has led to a surge in new, different jobs. Ned Ludd, who with his followers destroyed mechanical weaving machines in England in the early 1800s, was wrong. Mechanized weaving added far more related jobs than those lost.
But this time it could be different, warns John Raymont, chief strategy officer of Kurion, an advanced technology nuclear company. He says the difference is that automation heretofore has led to more products, and therefore more jobs. Artificial intelligence threatens to take away jobs without producing new products, which themselves produced new jobs.
Take the automobile production line: It led to more people being able to afford cars and more jobs maintaining and fueling those cars. It enhanced America’s growing prosperity.
So far, AI appears to be aimed directly at employment. In the way that cheap labor in Asia sucked manufacturing jobs out of the United States, so machines may take over skilled jobs from airline pilots to Uber drivers, Raymont says. Other jobs may still be safe, including plumbers, he says.
And it will not be just manual workers who will have their jobs taken over by wily computers. Accounting, tax preparing and auditing, money lending, loading and unloading ships and trucks will be done by machines guided by artificial intelligence. A ship, it is theorized, will be able to leave a U.S. port without the aid of seamen or dock workers and sail to Singapore, dock and unload autonomously.
Job displacement may have this opportunity: More leisure time in which people can play golf on greens maintained by thinking mowers, aerifiers and fertilizer spreaders. After they play, a machine may make them an extra dry martini at the club bar.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle on PBS. His e-mail is llewellynking1@gmail.com.