(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.
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.
She handed me her phone and we walked around the homestead with her showing me the ropes. As first, it was another wow experience, the technology aspect of it is pretty amazing. Then I took a photo of my pickup. The info it came up with, and the implications of it, creeped me out so bad it gave me goosebumps. Literally. The reply came back that based on certain characteristics, including the color and shade of the paint, it was a 19xx year and model made by XYZ company. Wow, I thought, that’s pretty amazing. I didn’t get freaked out until it continued on, “And based on the license plate number…” All of a sudden it became very personal in a very disturbing sort of way. Just what we need, one more way for the government to track us.
The implications went even further. What happens when either by legislation, or database hacking and leaking to the internet, that same license plate info will enable anyone who photographs it, or takes my photo, to know everything there is to know about me? Home address, phone number, where I bank, all my DNA connections (thanks to a genealogy relative), what kinds of books I order from Amazon, etc. What kind of a profile can a total stranger, or a nosy neighbor, put together on me based on something as simple as my Amazon purchases? Or the blogs I read? It’s one thing for the NSA to do this, I can’t stop them and they’re not likely to do much to me anytime soon other than keep building my file, but how about a nosy neighbor or that guy I parked a little too close to who keyed my car? Keying my car is one thing, but what worse things can he do with AI-provided info he can someday get just by taking a photo of my license plate or my face? If I did something worse by accident, would his next step after keying my car be to come to my house and shoot my dog?
It’s one thing to lose our privacy to the government, but it’s a whole new ballgame closer to home to lose our privacy to complete strangers or anyone else for that matter including family members. AI is rapidly moving us in that direction and has already arrived in many ways. How much closer will our grandchildren’s generation move toward a totalitarian government when all they’ve ever known is what they grew up with? A few more tweaks toward totalitarianism won’t mean as much to them as it does to us who have decades of experience to compare it to.
Facebook was a brilliant way to get people to willingly share their personal information with all the world. As a data-collection tool for harvesting personal information which is otherwise unobtainable, AI will send Facebook to the computer history museum to take its place next to the Commodore 64 as people give up even more personal information both knowingly and unknowingly.
With my daughter’s AI identifying app, I thought it would be fun to take a photo of the .22 varmint pistol I keep next to my reading chair to see how well it could identify everything about it. Then it occurred to me before I took the photo how something as simple and unthinking as that would let the world know that not only do I have a gun, but the exact one I have next to my reading chair. And by deduction, I probably have others. Everything we do with AI becomes part of the massive AI database, never to be forgotten, as it “learns” and collects more data to use for future requests.
For those concerned about the ramifications as we’re moving closer and closer to a totalitarian government, these things have to be considered and we should be educating our children and grandchildren on privacy issues to the best of our ability. They should be taught to cherish their privacy and once lost, there’s virtually no way to get it back.
Again, it doesn’t take fancy AI equipment to collect the data on us, we give so much of it us just using low-tech AI equipment like ChatGPT and other phone apps. I’m not talking hypothetical future things, but things that are happening right now.
(To be concluded tomorrow, in Part 3.)
Read the full article here