I had not one, but two existential shocks this week
(this article originally posted to SubStack in December 2022 and copied to danielbyrne.net)
This wasn’t the “Hello World” article I was planning to write as my first on Substack. In a way though, maybe it is.
I had not one but two existential shocks this week.
The first; being confronted with the state of our emergency services first-hand in a time of need. I won’t go over the details again but my child couldn’t breathe. An ambulance shortage meant a wait time of 2 to 3 hours, my car was out of action and no taxis would take the job. The local kids A&E was closed. Being confronted with the reality that we’re being asked to live in. My daughter is fine, thanks for asking.
The second (and I don’t compare the two without reason, and this may sound absurd, but please bear with me) was experiencing ChatGPT AI less than a day later.
Rise of the Robots
For people that haven’t seen it, Chat GPT is an evolution of GPT-3 from OpenAI. It’s like having an expert in pretty much every conceivable topic sitting next to you ready to answer questions. Not just a nerd though- it can generate art, compose and produce music write technical or fictional documents in any given style. It can create comedy sketches that are funny between actors that have never met.
Not just writing code but understanding requirements in plain English, interpreting what you’re asking for and outputting clean and efficient software (“make me a Twitter bot that harasses Elon Musk”). It can also tell you why code doesn’t work and suggest fixes and improvements. In a sense it can train you to be a developer.
It’s not perfect. A bit like a genie it needs you to know how to ask the right question and a genie that doesn’t really understand what you’re asking of it and can sometimes steer you in the wrong direction.
This will shortly put me and many like me out of a career.
For now this will be (and is) used as a power-suit for software devs like me. It’s already being used to write grad level essays. To create twitter bots. It will accelerate productivity by an unimaginable amount. OpenAI or one of its competitors will be the largest company in the world if the potential here is realised, no question in my mind. This is a new software revolution.
As this technology proliferates though, the role of “programmer” will quickly become obsolete. In fact, if you are in the middle or working class- paralegal, banker, writer, musician, artist, playwright, software developer — nothing is really safe here — you are about to be replaced by a machine. I’m not sure how long the role of the traditional software developer will exist for. It will certainly evolve and be more about integration with other components and services as well as include more higher level thinking and strategy.
So if a machine can do everything we can do but better then what’s left for the human? It’s not a new question but it might be the time to answer it.
The social solution.
Coming back to my first, more human shock. Being unable to call for an ambulance when your toddler can’t breathe isn’t ideal. Having the local childrens A&E be closed isn’t ideal. But then neither is being unable to afford to heat your home. To buy food. To pay your rent. These things, experienced, shake you to your core and makes you realise just how close to catastrophe you can be at any given moment.
Whether it’s something unexpected like losing your job to AI, or just being too poorly to work. Complete destitution is not far away. That’s the reality we’re being asked to live with each day.
The blame is pointed at the illegal immigrants. At the lazy. At the sick. At the woke. “Here mate, that foreigner is looking at your cookie”. It’s always at the people lower down on the ladder and never further up its rungs.
We can fight over the scraps and continue to turn on other in jealousy, or, we can start to value the individual and to support each others individual worth.
We can try to understand that not everybody is able to produce for this machine we call the economy who’s output goes to a select few. This is the case for a number of reasons, whether down to disability, mental health issues, or now obsolescence and we should understand that this is going to increasingly going to include a larger and larger percentage of our population, skilled or not.
We need a social safety net and a minimum standard of living for everybody as a matter of urgency. We’re talking about a four day week here in the UK but we should be talking about Universal Basic Income which has had studies and trials the world over. Anything less and we risk societal collapse which we already seem close to with vast swathes of the public sector on strike because of inhumane living and working conditions.
The nurses that we were clapping for so voraciously just a few years ago now having to use Universal Credit and food banks because living is unaffordable. There will be no jobs left. We are seeing the largest transfer of wealth in history. The lie that there is no money has been painfully exposed for all to see. Without wanting to send hyperbolic, the end is near.
Fork in the Road
This coming future has the likely possibility of rendering the working and middle classes obsolete, but it doesn’t have to be a dystopia.
In a future where bulk of the work in the knowledge economy can be performed by simply asking a computer to do the work – no matter how creative – and vast swathes of the population are deskilled it could be the human touch that will be valuable. The story behind the art. The feeling behind the service. The person behind the interaction. The human story.
Imagine a world where people, supported by UBI created and sold their own products. Maybe augmented by an AI or maybe even preferring “authentically human” designed products and services. Work from home would suddenly take on a new meaning. Our local towns and villages would be reinvigorated. Maybe what we need is a social revolution.
Universal Basic Income is being proven and doesn’t just give people a safety net and a minimum standard of living, it also allows them to invest their time and money in effort towards improving themselves, not being forced to sell the majority of their working lives for basic substenance and to enrich a far off shareholder or nation.
It will allow new cottage industries to grow, people to have time to care for their families and loved ones and a reinvigoration of our communities.
If we do not look again at how we tax big business, if we do not invest in our social services and provide some kind of support system like UBI we are going to find ourselves in a world where only the mega rich can afford heating, food, housing and healthcare. Where there will be no more ambulances or NHS. We know this, it’s time we confronted that and demand that huge multinationals and non-doms pay their share.
Whether it’s in the near future, because of automation and obsolescence – or in the here and now due to 4.8 million people currently on a non-liveable wage, 40% of children in conditions of child poverty, children dying of mould in their homes we are desperately in need of a solution.
Maybe it is time to look again a Universal Basic Income funded by a wealth tax.
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