I have often prefaced my comments by, “I’m not a luddite, but…” People familiar with that formulation will know that it is usually a way to deflect, in advance, likely criticism. Yes, I do know there is a thousand-year history of massive displacement by new technology.

Each revolution, or extinction-level event, first threw people out of work, then changed the nature of work, drastically reducing the number of people involved in the old work, regardless of skill or talent. We always tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new technology and underestimate the long-term, as noted by my friend Reid Ashe.

In modern times, extinction level events don’t destroy lines of work; they just mutate them to the point where it is no longer possible to make a living.

Case in point? My racket: writing. There were once thousands of writing jobs, many of them in dead-tree media. As you would expect, when there were salaries, there were more good writers than bad. Now, as you would expect, when the pay is zero, there are many bad writers and some good.¹ Alas, the audience can barely tell the difference, or doesn’t care. Free is a hard price to beat, no matter what the quality of the product.
The invention of the phonograph reduced demand for musicians based on their talent. Then Kevin Mostyn reminded me, there were events that reduced the demand for musicians regardless of talent.

*The introduction of “talkies.” There had been a need for musicians to accompany silent movies. This ranged from a solo pianist to a full symphony orchestra. That all disappeared with talking pictures.

* The death of big time radio. All major radio stations and the networks had their own orchestras. Those went away when TV came along.

There have always been those who opposed the new ways. “If book stores and music are disappearing, it means we don’t need them.”

Let me say this about that: if the automated machinery in the textile industry (which the Luddites tried to destroy) regularly made up patterns no one asked for, or duplicated patterns from other companies without permission or payment, or tried to sell imaginary products, it might not have put all the home weavers out of work.

I keep hearing, “Today, AI is as stupid as it will ever be.” Maybe, but it’s not clear to me that it’s going to get smarter, by any realistic definition of the term. Nothing is idiot-proof because idiots are so ingenuous. Most of the literature I have seen posits that hallucinations are inherent in Large Language Models.

They are industrial level cut and paste engines, working on the same principal as predictive text on your iPhone, and just about as smart and creative.

There are a pair of Nobel-winning economists who have tackled this subject—in comic book form. Perfect for the readers of this column.

Let me conclude by saying this. There are many tasks for which LLM is well suited, and many for which it is not. Let us hope someone, somewhere can tell this difference. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I don’t know what it looks like when you have an elephant gun and a chainsaw.

As the Pythons put it in the Galaxy Song, “And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space, ‘Cause there’s bugger-all down here on Earth!”

1. 1. Modesty forbids ↩︎