A Labor-Saving Device

Notes on the AI Revolution

When in doubt, call Alexa. Alexa always has an answer, and she is, moreover, always listening, always waiting. Kings used to keep scholars and seers on hand to tell them what they didn’t know. We have Alexa.

We are, perhaps, facing an economic revolution triggered by AI performing intellectual labor in the workplace. With less concrete, but no less serious, results, AI is also performing intellectual labor in private life. Labor is labor, whether physical or mental, and AI is a labor-saving device.

The intellectual task most commonly delegated to AI is research. Rather than look up information, we call on AI to provide it to us. When all we need is a single, simple fact, it makes little difference whether we google it or ask Alexa. What is the temperature outside? What date is Easter this year? When did Shakespeare live? The answer is no more than a word or two.

Sometimes the answer contains multitudes. Suppose you were to ask a substantial question. What caused World War I? What did Thomas Jefferson do? What is Communism? Shelves of books have been written on each of these subjects. Instead of reading any of those books, or even an article or Wikipedia page, you can order up a summary from Alexa. It will be short and sweet. A few facts will be selected, through some mysterious algorithm, and the rest—the majority—will be omitted.

Writing is another task delegated to AI. Grok will write anything for you. A school paper, a business email, a love letter, a wedding toast, a eulogy. Grok has no shame.

The research and the writing flow together into the final mental task that AI will shoulder for us: thinking. The bullet-point summaries dished up by AI do not only omit facts. They eliminate the time spent on reading any work longer than a paragraph or two. This, of course, is part of the point. But it is during that reading—that dwelling on a subject, from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph—that thoughts crop up.

In the same fashion, we outsource our thinking to AI with our writing. You cannot have words without thoughts. Writing always develops beliefs and ideas. You may invent new arguments or put away old ones as being unpersuasive when you get down to expressing them. You may stumble over nuances or caveats or corollaries while chasing down the main point. You never know quite what you think, or quite why you think it, until you try to set it down in black and white.

Machines have been designed to read and write and think. They don’t do it as well as humans do; the bullet-point summaries are often riddled with errors, and the writing is flat, pockmarked with cliches, and curiously impersonal. As for the thinking—well, AI is a parrot. But many people don’t care if the work is done poorly as long as someone (something) else does it.

We have built the machines, or somebody has. Now we will take our leisure. 

Note: This is the second of a six-part series, “Notes on the AI Revolution.” The pieces are planned to be published two weeks apart. The series will also be published on Substack, where you may subscribe to receive notifications.