Bit late, folks!
My wife is a university lecturer. As jobs disappear around her, AI is making her and her remaining colleagues’ lives a misery as they try to decipher what their students know and what cheat-tech can help them pretend they know.
In The Social Dilemma, even Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, said he has regrets.Credit: Netflix
My daughter, who is doing the HSC, is trying to pick a career that Open AI’s CEO Sam Altman doesn’t think bots can do better than she can. She’s stressed because she’s creative and wants to do the kind of work Altman claims isn’t “real work”. I’ve suggested she become an internet lawyer. Something tells me we’re gonna need lots of them.
I pray digital journalism is “real work” long enough for me to pay off the mega-mortgage that keeps me awake at night. It’s a rewarding career where we fact check before we publish and if we do incorrectly say an innocent graphic designer is a child-murderer, we are held to account.
My son wants to be a pilot, which I used to be before I realised I enjoyed writing about flying more than actually doing it. I worry for him, not because of the existing perceived dangers but because, to save money, some airlines are considering just one pilot in the cockpit. Never mind that many modern aviation accidents are due to technology factoring the pilot out of the equation, such as the 2009 Air France disaster when 228 people were in their final moments while the pilots frantically tried to figure out what the hell their plane was doing. Man and machine were at odds with each other. They often are.
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Rather than single-pilot cockpits, the challenge for airline manufacturers should be to re-embrace the human it sought to render redundant. And in many ways, that should be society’s challenge as well.
If you’ve read this far, you’re possibly thinking I’m a Luddite who should go plough a field with a horse. Nah, I’m just fed up with hearing everyone bemoan the scourge of social media on mental health and the jobs that will be lost to machines while thinking there’s nothing we can do about it.
Why do we put up with a path to a detrimental future being paved by people who won’t need to walk it? Why don’t we harness AI to fix old problems rather than create new ones? On my way home from work every night, I sit forlornly at red traffic lights on a main road while no cars go through the green light from the minor road. There’s something AI could surely set its sights on.
The only person I’ve heard speak highly of AI is my son, who used ChatGPT to generate a persuasive text trying to convince his dad to buy him an ebike. Unashamedly, he even sent me the prompts he used – his only input.
I didn’t need AI to help me craft my response, which was until he can persuade me himself, he ain’t getting one.
Chris Harrison is content director at The Sydney Morning Herald.
