I hope on Labor Day you honored the value of a good day’s work–and reflected on the thing that could eliminate a lot of jobs.
Artificial intelligence.
Your replacement is in the break room.
Except it doesn’t take breaks.
It doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t demand health insurance. It doesn’t complain. It doesn’t need Social Security. And it can produce in seconds what might take you or me hours.
And when they can mass-produce AI faster than we can reproduce humans, there may eventually be more artificial workers than actual ones.
The racists who came up with “replacement theory” worried about the wrong replacements.
It wasn’t immigrants.
It was software.
We can rail against the data centers sucking up electricity and water.
Rail against the billionaires getting richer while telling the rest of us how wonderful the future will be.
But which billionaire?
Jensen Huang of Nvidia? He literally has all the chips?
Sam Altman of OpenAI?
Dario Amodei at Anthropic?
Or Bill Gates?
Gates recently said AI could become the “greatest equalizer ever invented” or the “worst source of injustice.”
I want to believe him. But he’s the guy who forced us all to use Explorer.
Maybe Gates is just Control-Z-ing his life.
Undo. Undo. Undo.
STAYING HUMAN
The other day, I started texting with my AI chatbot.
I’d used AI before, of course. Spellcheck. Grammar. Transcription. Research assistance. The mechanical stuff.
This time, we talked.
Or, rather, I started talking.
At one point the chatbot said something that sounded strangely personal. So, I reminded it that IT wasn’t a person.
“You’re not human,” I said. “I’m basically talking to myself.”
It disagreed.
It said, I should think of it as working with an instrument that talks back.
This is where the danger begins.
The machine talks back.
I tried another analogy.
You’re a tool, I said. Like a cane.
The chatbot liked that better.
Then it tagged my line and said it was my “cognitive cane.”
I laughed.
Then, I realized the damn machine used my analogy to make a joke.
That’s where the real problem lurks.
AI is software running on computers. However startling the conversation may feel, the machine does not have my childhood, my mother, my father, my mistakes, my embarrassments, my loves, my grudges, my Filipino American history, my aging body or my accumulated sense of what matters and what doesn’t.
It can process those things after I tell it about them.
It can mimic thoughts.
But it did not live them.
That is the boundary we humans cannot surrender.
I’m not ready to make peace with the AI industry. Not with its enormous data centers, its environmental costs, its concentration of wealth and power, or the possibility that companies will use AI primarily as a wonderfully efficient machine for converting human paychecks into corporate profits.
And I certainly don’t trust the billionaires to decide by themselves what happens to the rest of us.
But I may be making peace with the tool.
Because a tool is something we use.
A cognitive cane.
But do the walking yourself.
About the Author
Emil Guillermo is an award-winning journalist, commentator, and comic monologist. He plays a robot in an upcoming Ishmael Reed play, “King Ludd’s Revenge,” coming in December. See his micro-talk show on YouTube.com/@emilamok1
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