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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses

MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?

AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.

Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.

The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies

Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.

The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/cf.opinion.rael/

The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.

Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.

According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."

Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.

What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.

Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.

See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.

"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."

Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

#pluralistic #elon musk #neuralink #potemkin ai #neural interface beta-tester #full self driving #mechanical turks #ai #amazon #amazon go #clm #joan westenberg

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after-witch · 7 months

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Bright Lights (Small Spaces Quartet Sequel) (Chapter 2)

Title: Bright Lights (Chapter 2) A03 LINK

Synopsis: Sam tells her friends about her mom's refusal to sign the permission slip for the circus, and they have a plan.

Word count: appx 1700

“You’ve never been to a circus? Like, never never?”

Owen Sannerson’s eyebrows raised in scrupulous disbelief. He had moved to Evansburg two years ago, and while Sam and Elisa considered him a best friend by now, he still had a hard time accepting that Samantha Adler simply didn’t do what most teens her age did.

Sam shrugged. She wanted to change the subject. She also wanted to finish her sandwich before the cheese got all cold and gloppy, and maybe work on her poems one more time before English class. Anything to forget about the permission slip and poster handout that Elisa had slapped in the center of the table at the start of lunch period, eager to find out exactly what had happened with Sam’s mom.

“Nope. Too much like a carnival, I guess, and my mom hates those.” Sam made a sour face. She didn’t really like talking all the things she couldn’t do, especially after this morning’s latest rejection. If she piled all the cool field trips or friend hang-outs she had to stay back from on top of one another, it might just reach the top of a skyscraper.

“She hates farms, too,” Elisa chimed in, popping a lukewarm fry into her mouth. “And ski lodges, unless it’s the Battersby’s place.”

Sam sighed and took another bite of her sandwich. Blech. Too late. The cheese was gloppy. Yet another reason to ask grandpa to teach her his recipes, so she didn’t have to put up with school lunch.

Elisa curled a bit of her shoulder-length dark hair around a finger. She was wearing her in-school hockey jersey and cozy sweatpants. The team had a game next week and Elisa never missed a chance to get hyped, especially now that she was taking lessons from Sam’s uncle Brian. He ran a sports camp in the next town over and offered lessons in just about any sport imaginable; even games like chess, although those classes were taught by his wife Coco.

Elisa tapped the unsigned permission slip with her short fingernail.

“Do you remember when she flipped out when we were supposed to go to the re-opening day of Misty Valley Farm, or whatever they renamed it?”

Sam wished she could forget. That was back in 6th grade. Sam wasn’t allowed to go to the farm with the rest of her class, but she’d cried so pitifully to her teacher Mrs. Norris that the sweet lady had called Sam’s mom on the spot to ask permission as the buses were being loaded.

That had ended with Olivia Adler peeling up to the school in her car about 15 minutes later and taking Sam home for the day while a bewildered Mrs. Norris and snickering classmates had watched.

The car ride home had been quiet, save for Sam’s occasional sniffles. At a stoplight, her mom had turned to her, and opened her mouth as if she wanted to explain something… but she only closed it again and drove them home without another word.

It was always like that, like there was something her mom really wanted to tell her that would explain away everything; but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. It made Sam mad. More than that, it was frustrating. Couldn’t her mom see that she was old enough to take care of herself? Couldn’t her mom see that she didn’t need to be coddled all the time?

Although a small part of her wanted to defend her mom. There was clearly something going on that made her act this way, when she was otherwise pretty rational, as far as parents went. The divorce probably didn’t help things. And grandpa being sick didn’t help things. That’s why they had to move back to the Egg in the first place.

Sam sighed and shoved her lunch tray to the side, suddenly not feeling very hungry. “It’s shitty. But what can I do? I guess I’ll be 18 before I see a circus or go to a farm.” She snorted through her nose at the thought of scampering up to farm animals or picking pumpkins for the first time after graduating high school.

Elisa was uncharacteristically quiet. This usually meant that she was coming up with a plan or a scheme--with Elisa, plans and schemes tended to amount to the same thing.

“Elisa,” she said slowly, carefully.

Elisa looked at Owen, who held her gaze before suddenly becoming very interested in his lap.

“What?” said Sam, half-worried, half-excited.

Elisa’s chair screeched as she scooted closer to Sam, before gesturing for Owen to do the same. He tucked a stray piece of his chin length blonde hair behind his ear and copied Elisa, until the three of them were close enough to whisper.

“So, me and Owen have been talking,” Elisa began, pulling the permission slip from the center of the table until it was right in front of Sam. “And here’s the plan. You forge your mom’s signature. Go on the trip. Have some fun for once in your life.” She tapped the paper decisively. “Your mom never has to find out. Perfect plan, right?”

Was it possible for your stomach to drop out from underneath you? Sam thought it might be possible, because that’s what her stomach was currently doing, gloppy cheese and all.

“I can’t.” Her words were stiff. “My mom would know. Or she’d find out. I’d be in trouble.” A half-laugh forced its way out of Sam’s throat. “No, I’d be grounded for the rest of my life and even after that. She’d ground my ghost.”

Elisa began to twirl the paper on the table with her finger. “Not if you pretend to be super upset about not going before and after the trip and she never finds out you went…”

“I’m not that good an actor,” Sam mumbled.

“I can give you tips!” Owen said suddenly, sitting up a little straighter. “I’ve only done tech here but I’m really into acting.”

Sam sighed. Then put both hands on her cheeks and shut her eyes and groaned. The idea was tempting. It wasn’t like she hadn’t considered it before. But the fear of her mom finding out always outweighed the desire to go through with it.

“C’mon, Sam.” Elisa picked up the circus poster handout that their teacher Mr. Wheeling had given them two weeks ago. “There hasn’t been a circus here since… I can’t even remember one coming to Evansburg. You have to go.”

The poster was crinkled a little from being in Sam’s backpack, but at least it wasn’t torn. It was designed to look old-fashioned, which Sam supposed was “in” nowadays. There was an illustration featuring a cluster of tents, and a banner across the top that said: “MR. ELIM’S CIRCUS. ALL AGES WELCOME.”

At the bottom of the poster, there was a close-up illustration of a man in a ringmaster’s uniform gazing up at the tent and grinning. Something about him was a little unnerving, like his grin was too big or something. Sam wondered if her friends felt the same; but probably not, especially Elisa, who didn’t even flinch when they’d watched IT Chapter One and Two in Owen’s basement last Halloween. Sam, by contrast, had slept with her desk lamp on for a week.

Next to the ringmaster were a series of faded blue banners that described circus acts.

“FEROCIOUS BEASTS! SEE TIGERS TAMED!

FLYING TRAPEZE! DEATH-DEFYING HEIGHTS!

REAL LIVE FIRE BREATHERS! HOTTER THAN HADES!

ENDLESS SIGHTS THAT WILL ASTOUND AND AMAZE!

PERFORMANCES YOU WILL NEVER FORGET!”

They did sound amazing and astounding and wonderful.

And her mom would never, ever let her see them.

And even if Sam did try to forge her mom’s signature and go on the trip, who’s to say she wouldn’t find out somehow, anyway? Sam might pop in the background of someone’s video online or Mr. Wheeling would call Olivia to say how glad he was that Sam was going on a field trip for once.

Besides, Sam was too scared to forge her mom’s signature. Especially on something as serious--well, in the Adler household, it was serious--as this.

Sam felt a familiar tightness in her chest begin to grow and pushed back from her chair. Before Owen or Elisa could say anything, she grabbed both papers and shoved them deep into her backpack.

“Sam,” Owen said, and reached out to touch her on the arm. Owen was good at one-on-one talks like this, sort of like her grandpa. But she didn’t feel like being reassured right now. She just wanted to be mad at the unfairness of her life.

“My mom would find out,” Sam said shortly, hoisting her backpack over her shoulder. “Or I’d mess it up somehow and blab or copy her signature wrong or…” She sighed. “Sorry.”

Owen did touch Sam’s arm, then, and looked incredibly thoughtful.

“Why don’t you ask your mom again tonight? Like, sit her down and have a full-on discussion about it? Maybe you can find the website for this circus or whatever and show her that it’s not a big deal. It did say all ages, so it’s got to be mild enough for little kids.”

Sam shook her head, but didn’t outright say she wouldn’t do it. Owen was just giving her advice. She couldn’t be mad at him for that, even if it was something she’d tried to do on her own countless times over the years.

And maybe… maybe her mom would listen, if she took the time to explain. Her mom had been in a rush that morning, what with Sam running late. Her mom was always stressed in the morning, especially if her grandpa needed help during the night.

Was it worth a shot?

Sam nodded at Owen and tried to smile, but it wasn’t anything to write home about. “Maybe. Text me after school, guys. Or during 6th period, I’ll have my sound off. I gotta go to the bathroom before lunch ends.”

With that, Sam Adler walked away from her friends with thoughts of permission slips and serious discussions weaving heavily on her mind.

“Tell your mom, it’s just a circus!” Elisa called out after Sam, all 15 years of her life experience weighing behind each word. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

#small spaces #katherine arden #small spaces quartet #fanfiction #afterwitch writes #bright lights

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generation-dope · 1 year

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CNN

The Source unsigned hype - October 1995

#capone-n-noreaga #the source #90s hip hop #queensbridge

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empressamberrage · 5 months

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sophsicle · 1 year

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okay but what we don’t talk enough about is the kyd to watching hockey/juniors pipeline

milic? someone draft him now

bedard? how can a 17 year old be so good

wright? happpppyyyy birthday

did i watch all of juniors and am i yelling at my tv regularly about nhl games even though i hadn’t watched a full hockey game until 4 months ago? yes absolutely, i love all those boys playing a silly game with sticks on ice

how are you feeling after the game!?!

I LOVE ALL THESE BOYS PLAYING A SILLY GAME WITH STICKS ON ICE

That's so real Milic, like he can't be drafted cause he's too old (don't ask me who came up with that rule) but they have to be like younger than 20 going into their draft year I think and he's turning 20 in April or something. BUT I do believe he is technically an unsigned free agent (what's the difference Soph, you might ask, I don't know really, but the important thing is, GIVE THE KID A CONTRACT YOU FOOLS) Bedard is, so far, a gem. Like so so so good. But the amount he hypes up his team really endears him to me. Wright, I'm so torn about this guy. Cause like, Idk if you saw the whole draft day drama (it was incredible guys, honestly, I was LIVING for it) BUT anyway, the fact that he was supposed to go first overall and he went 4th allegedly because of his piss poor attitude? makes me wary of him WE WON!!!!!!!!!!!!! I LOVE WINNING!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

#soph rambles #hockey talk

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band-it-app · 2 years

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8 Mindset Shifts that Will 10X Your Music

Hello everyone! The blog is kicking back into gear and what better way than by showing you how to increase your musical talents and build a strong mind! Its Band-its 8 techniques to 10x your Musical Success!

A few useful Jedi Mind Tricks to increase your odds of success 10x Your Musical Success 1. Time is precious Our time in this life is limited. Even so, most of us live in the exact opposite way. We live as though we will be around forever. We waste years at Jobs that we hate, stay with people we’re not entirely happy with, and tolerate situations that don’t make us feel fulfilled. Break free…

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#band #independent artist #indie artist #motivational #music #music artist #music collaboration #music management #music manager #music producer #musicblog #musician #unsigned #unsigned artist #unsigned hype #unsigned rapper

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kae-karo · 9 months

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Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers. Let’s spread the self-love ❤

JACK HELLO TYTY 💜💜 i feel like i always hype myself up over the same fics so i'm gonna go with some deep(er) cuts that i really loved writing? and ur getting....more than 5 cause i feel like it !!!

don't want to say goodnight (x) - bnha - shinkami

this i think was my first sincere venture into outsider pov of a relationship? i had fun with the lil bit of worldbuilding and denki and jirou's friendship 🥺

to the stars that burn (x) - bnha - dabihawks

one of my first hurt/no comfort fics and basically still one of my only ones?? but i got so enamored with the idea that dabihawks trained together as kids at the hero commission and just. how horribly that all fell out

our hearts are heavy burdens we shouldn't have to bear alone (x) - genshin - chaeya

i just. had so so many feelings about chaeya seeking each other out as a source of comfort in the wake of their own broken hearts and traumatic pasts and just. poured all of that into this fic and i love it so much i know i never shut up abt it when i get the chance to rec stuff of mine lmaooo but i really do love it

i think that i'm learning to hope (oh no) (x) - genshin - kaeluc

this one just truly captivated me while i was writing like i love writing kaeya pov generally but i had so much fun with it during this fic? just the balance of nostalgia and heartache and tentative fluffy reconciliation lmao

letters unsigned and unsent out of fear (x) - genshin - kaeluc

this was a BLAST to craft with the letters between kaeya and diluc in mind, i just truly got possessed writing this one lmaoooo like i have nothing else to say beyond that it was just so much fun

i don't bite (but i heard you might) (x) - bnha - todobaku

bro i kid u not i had a BLAST with this like the banter the tension the worldbuilding it was just so so much fun i was SO excited to post this one lmaooooo

keep my fingers crossed (that i'm somebody you could love) (x) - bllk - kaisae

jack u know i had to do it to em i have to mention a kaisae fic cause u brought me here to the kaisae basement sdlfjlksdf but honestly this ship has been UNREASONABLY fun to write???? like the fact that i was within a couple weeks living breathing these two ???? this one specifically i really loved writing just playing with their characterizations (it was the first one i wrote actually lmao)

(and much like u i am frothing at the mouth over fics i haven't posted yet so prepare for some serial killer kaisagi and silly multiship blue lock mall au fic sometime in the future and i rly have so many bllk fics impending i'm so sorry to everyone who was not prepared for me to get obsessed with bllk lmao)

#ask #alienjack

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tesl8n · 1 year

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Powers of 2, ranked

32 - As stated in the tags of that other post, I have a special relationship to this one, it was the first power of two I was introduced to and it'll always hold it special in my heart. You know that one post about hyping up your lame boyfriend? That's me and 32. She's special in my heart, and I don't care what you say.

1024 - More than any other power of 2, this one just feels right. Like yeah, 2^10 is 1024. It's the one that breaks the base-10 4 digit barrier, and its power is 10! It's perfect. And it forms the basis of all the other order of magnitude powers - 2^20 ≈ 1 million = 2^10 * 2^10, ofc! And so on. It's a beautiful synergy between two very different bases, and I love it.

2^31, ~2.1 billion - The maximum positive value for a signed integer in most systems. Or, well, one over that, because this is the point where it overflows to negative. It's just such a cool trait, and the one most people are likely to have interacted with in interesting ways that get into the technicalities of modern software development.

256 - The maximum positive value for an unsigned 8-bit integer. This is the overflow point for a lot of NES-era games and earlier, and it's cool for very similar reasons. Very close ranking between 3 & 4. Fun fact: The reason it jumps from 2^8 to 2^32 is because 8 & 32 are themselves powers of 2. And for technical reasons, those form very convenient numbers for indexing positions in memory, because you can store the power of the array in a power-of-two number of bits as well, which is real neat.

64 - The minecraft stack size. Listen, credit where it's due, she's done so much to spread knowledge about powers of 2, probably more than any of the others on this list. I love that minecraft used 64 for its stack size, even though it didn't have to and it's such an unintuitive number.

16 - Hexadecimal is a nice base, I like it. I love that you can represent 256 with two hex digits, and that it can be such a cool little syndication of another important power of 2 in computing.

2048 - I've got a max score in this game, so it's obviously on the list.

2^16 - The max tile in 2048. Okay, well, this is a lie, you can go one higher by filling the entire board, then spawning a 10% chance 4 in the bottom left. I've obtained a 2^17, but never finished a whole game with it. Plus, 2^17 just isn't as pretty as 2^16 - 65,536 feels like it could be a power of 2, it's got that 64 feel. 131,072 doesn't feel like anything.

#THE EXPERIENCE #anyway thanks to the 2^n poll for letting me think about powers of two some more :P

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 months

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The REAL AI automation threat to workers

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Long before the current wave of AI hype, we were being groomed for automation panics with misleading stories. Remember this one? "'Truck driver' is the most common job in America. Self-driving trucks are just around the corner. How can we prevent America's army of truckers from turning into a howling mob when the robots steal their jobs?"

https://futurism.com/millions-of-jobs-are-at-risk-but-their-loss-could-be-for-the-greater-good

It was absolute nonsense. First of all, "truck driver" isn't a particularly common job in America! The BLS lumps together all cargo vehicle drivers under a single classification. The category error here was thinking that every delivery van driver, furniture mover, and courier is behind the wheel of a big rig, cracking wise on a CB radio as they tear up the interstate.

But what about automation threats? It's possible that if we redesigned the interstates to give 16 wheelers their own separated lanes, and then set them to following one another, that they could traverse long distances in that way. Congratulations, you've just invented a shitty, failure-prone train.

"Shitty train AI" does not threaten the job of the vast number of people the BLS classifies as "truck drivers." For one thing, "shitty train AI" isn't going to pilot a UPS van around the streets of a busy city with other road users. Sure, a few robotaxi companies have bamboozled city governments into conscripting the city's residents into an uncontrolled murderbot experiment. These are not going well:

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/9-key-leaders-depart-gms-cruise-amid-ongoing-investigation-into-san-francisco-incident/

More than $100b has been set on fire chasing the robotaxi dream, and the result is most charitably described as a technological curiosity, requiring 1.5 high-waged remote technicians to replace each low-waged driver:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

But even if we could perfect this technology, robots still wouldn't replace all those "truckers" who drive delivery vans (to say nothing of moving vans!). The hard part of driving a UPS van isn't just getting it from place to place – it's getting the parcel into the place. The robo-van would still need at least one person to get the parcel from the back of the van and into the reception desk, porch, or other delivery zone. It's not going to fire those parcels at your door with a catapult. It's also not going to deliver them by drones. Drone delivery is another one of those historical curiosities, capable of delivering a very narrow range of parcels, under even narrower circumstances:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#droned

If all UPS delivered was lightweight, non-fragile rectangular parcels ordered by people with large, unobstructed back yards, then sure. Congrats, you've just created the world's least-useful parcel delivery service!

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/06/amazon-drone-delivery-service-seeks-faa-approval-to-launch-in-2022/

All that said, the big rig drivers probably don't need to worry about robots stealing their jobs. It's not even clear that "shitty train" is within our technological grasp, but even if it is, there's yet another problem with the AI automation trucker jobpocalypse: "trucker" is already one of the worst jobs in America:

https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/news/rigged-forced-into-debt-worked-past-exhaustion-left-with-nothing/

It's hard to overstate just how fucking terrible it is to be a trucker. Truckers are trapped in abusive debt holes by their employers – who misclassify their workforce as "contractors" in a bid to sidestep labor law. Shriven of any labor rights, truckers are forced into the most ghastly, body-destroying, family-wrcking, financially precarious existence imaginable.

You can drive a truck for years, give almost all of the money you earn back to your employer (who denies that you're their employee) to pay back the usurious loan for your truck. Then, your employer can underschedule for shifts so that you miss a loan payment, and they can repo your truck and keep the six-figure repayment you've already made to them, leaving you destitute.

They can force you to work for hours – days! – without pay while you wait for loading and dispatch. They can make you drive long past the point of safety, then, if (when) you get into a wreck, they can fine you for not taking the mandated rest breaks.

Now, these drivers aren't about to be replaced by AI – but that doesn't mean that AI won't affect their jobs. Commercial drivers are among the most heavily surveilled workers in the country. Amazon's drivers (whom Amazon misclassifies as subcontractors) have their eyeballs monitored by AI;

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

AIs monitor the voices of the (primarily Black, primarily female) workforce at Arise – homeworkers who field customer service calls for blue-chip companies like Carnival Cruises and Disney. They're listening for unruly children or pets in the background, and workers who fail to muffle these dependents lose the contracts they have to pay to train for:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#toothless

And AI monitors the conduct of workers on temp-work apps. If a worker is dispatched to a struck workplace and refuses to cross the picket-line, the AI boss fires you and blacklists you from future jobs for refusing to robo-scab:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork

Writing in The Guardian, Steven Greenhouse describes the AI-enabled workplace, where precarious, often misclassified workers are monitored, judged, and fined by algorithms:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/07/artificial-intelligence-surveillance-workers

Whether it's the robot that gets you disciplined for sending an email with the word "union" in it or the robot that takes money out of your paycheck if you take a bathroom break, AI has come for the workplace with a vengeance.

Here's a supreme irony: nearly all of the beneficial applications for AI require that AI be used to help workers, not replace them, which is absolutely not how AI is used in the workplace. An AI that helps radiologists by giving them a second opinion might help them find tumors on x-rays, but that's a tool that reduces the number of scans a radiologist processes in a shift, by making them go back and reconsider the scans they've already processed:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

But AI's sales pitch is not "Buy an AI tool and increase your costs while increasing your accuracy." The pitch for AI is "buy and AI and save money by firing workers." Given how bad AIs are at replacing humans, this is a bad deal all around, both for the worker who loses their job and the customer who gets the substandard product the AI makes.

There is a very limited slice of applications where an AI could make a lot of money for a company that deploys it, without costing that company anything when the AI screws up. For example, AI is a really good tool for fraud! Rather than paying people to churn out millions of variations on a phishing email, you can get an AI to do it. If the AI writes a bad phishing email, it's OK, since nearly all recipients of even good phishing emails delete them. What's more, no one will fine you or publish an op-ed demanding that your board of directors fire you if you buy an incompetent AI to commit fraud. Fraud is a high-value, low-consequence environment for using AI.

Another one of those applications is managing precarious workers who don't have labor rights. If the AI unfairly docks your worker's wages, or forces them to work until they injure themselves or others, or decides that their eyeball movements justify firing them, those workers have no recourse. That's the whole point of pretending that your employees are contractors: so you can violate labor law with impunity!

But that's not the ironic part. The ironic part is that "being a shitty boss" is the one AI application that companies are willing to increase their net spending on. No one buys an eyeball-monitoring AI so they can fire a manager. This is the one place where AI is there to augment, rather than replace, an employee.

This makes AI-based bossware subtly different from other forms of Taylorism, the "scientific management" fad of the early 20th century that saw management consultants choreographing the postures and movements of workers to satisfy the aesthetic fetishes of their employers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

The pseudoscientific cod-ergonomics of the 1900s was demeaning and even dangerous, but it wasn't automated, and if it increased worker output, this was incidental to the real purpose of making workers move like the machine-cogs their bosses reassured themselves they were:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Every AI panic is a way of deflecting attention from the real, grimy, here-and-now ways that AI is destroying our lives by demanding that we entertain nonsensical science fiction claims about large, shiny existential risks that AI might present in the future.

The "X-risk" of the spicy autocomplete chatbot waking up and using its newfound sentience to turn us all into paperclips is nonsense. Adding words to the plausible sentence generator doesn't turn it into a superintelligence for the same reason that selectively breeding faster horses doesn't lead to locomotives:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

But there is a way that AI could destroy the human race! The carbon footprint and water consumption associated with training and operating large-scale models are significant contributors to the climate emergency, which threatens the habitability of the only planet in the known universe capable of sustaining human life:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2023/04/14/ais-unsustainable-water-use-how-tech-giants-contribute-to-global-water-shortages/

Likewise, AI isn't going to replace you at work. But it's already augmenting your shitty boss's ability to rip you off, torment you, maim you and even kill you in order to eke out a few more basis points for the next shareholder report.

Science fiction is a fun and useful way to tell parables about our current technologies. But it's not a roadmap for the future. The fact that sf writers like me found AIs as useful measures to describe Earth's dominant artificial life form – the limited liability corporation – doesn't mean that superhuman AIs should – or can – be created.

Back the Kickstarter for the DRM-free audiobook of The Bezzle, read by Tumblr's own @wilwheaton!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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