by St. Funogas, Survival Blog:
(Continued from Part 1.)
TRYING AN AI APP
After my wow experience with my daughter showing me how her drawing app works, she showed me the ropes and I started doing some pictures myself. Since I have the artistic ability of a quadriplegic starfish, it was a lot of fun to be able to create some photos, paintings, and cartoon characters. I’ve been working on illustrating the events of my life the year I was nine years old. While it’s done nothing to develop the artistic portion of my brain, it’s physiologically too late for that, it’s been amusing. And amusement is one of the things which cause us to use these types of AI applications more and more until they become the new norm.
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While there shouldn’t be an earth-shattering events caused by an old geezer creating some illustrations, other revelations occurred to me as I’ve been playing around with it.
FUTURE EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES
I’ve always loved the poem Maud Muller but wanted to do an illustrated version of my parody of it which has a happily-ever-after ending. In the process, the radical changes in employment opportunities that are already happening really hit home. I had only ever thought of robots putting burger flippers out of a job but discovered it’s way more than that.
While working on that project (since abandoned) one thing was for certain. After falling in love with an older woman at Jamestown (she was 18, I was 12) who was wearing a red peasant dress and demonstrating how to spin wool, I knew my Maud Muller had to be wearing the same dress. When making an illustration, it often takes 10 tweaks to get things as close as you can to make the illustration you have in mind. With each version the illustration the AI program came up, that peasant dress was tweaked just a little bit. Had I finished all twelve illustrations I had planned, it would have made 120 different versions of just that one peasant dress, all slightly different. I can’t help but think, in the real world how many clothes designers will even such a simple AI app that I was using send to the unemployment lines? How many people will never even be able to pursue clothes designing as a career? If one AI program used by a country bumpkin can see 10 different versions of one peasant dress in twenty minutes, how is that going to affect the number of future clothes designers needed in the world?
When you expand that even further, how many architects, medical people, researchers, and designers of all kinds from rocket engines to cars to kitchen cabinets, will it take compared to the number we have today? I’m not a Luddite by any means and I’m not trying to say these kinds of developments will necessarily be bad for society. But I can’t help but wonder what will become of people and society in general over the long run when so many jobs have become either extinct or the number of employees in those jobs, including educated professionals, are greatly minimized?
How will my grandchildren support themselves when they reach employment age? What kind of personal economic future should we be prepping for? We tend to hear only about how robots will put McDonalds employees out of a job, but what about all these other high-paying, “career” types of jobs currently done by so many people?
Many will argue that other jobs will take their place just as former buggy-whip makers went on to work on the assembly lines at Ford making Model-Ts. AI will artificially and exponentially increase the “population” of workers so I’m not convinced the Model-T analogy will pan out. What do my grandchildren have to look forward to and plan for?
As JWR mentioned in his article on AI, on a personal level one of the most important things we can do is to help our children grandchildren (and other young people we come in contact with) be aware of these things and to more or less try to predict the future of where AI is headed and plan for it, in terms of education.
In his article, JWR wrote:
“As a personal illustration, I should mention that my youngest son is now in his third year at a university here in The American Redoubt, studying for a degree in computer science. His prospects for finding a job when he graduates in 2027 have dropped dramatically since his freshman year. I’m now advising him to pursue a career in software design rather than programming. Otherwise, he’ll be another buggy whip maker.”
It’s hard to even imagine that just in the three short years he’s been in college, how exponentially rapidly AI has progressed to the point where maybe computer programming isn’t a such a great idea anymore. Who could possibly have guessed just a few years ago that something as important as computer programming could become almost obsolete in many ways? Using AI programming tools, one of my daughters was able to design and construct a website for her business when a few months before the only thing she knew about programming was how to spell the word. One more concrete example of why I’m worried about what kinds of occupations will be available when my youngest grandchildren and great-grandchildren reach employment age.
INCREASED LOSS OF PRIVACY
Another AI app my artist daughter showed me during her visit was one which allows you to take a picture of something, anything, and it will tell you what it is, then give you a lot of information about it if you wish. You can take a photo of a salamander and it will identify it for you, tell you the common name, the Latin genus and species, geographical distribution, and any other possibly thing you would care to know about that salamander.
