I'm Not Loving the AI Jobs Discourse Right Now
It's failing to meet our very low standards for national discourse
A recent clip from The Daily Show made me laugh, and not in the way that The Daily Show used to make me laugh. Here’s Jon Stewart aghast at how some leaders of AI companies talk about labor:
I laughed out loud at the faint, half-a-beat-too-late “Oooo” from the audience. It was so perfunctory — it seemed like they realized that Jon believed he had just made a salient point and that they should react out of politeness. But what Jon sees as a damning “gotcha” strikes me as a slightly inartful phrasing: Yeah, “tax” hits the ear sharply, and the correct word is “cost”. But labor is objectively a cost — that’s how economists of all stripes have referred to it for hundreds of years. The “cost” part is actually what people like about having a job — for most folks, a key aspect of employment is the “receiving a paycheck” part. The odd thing isn’t that a business owner would view labor as a cost; the odd thing is that anyone would imagine that companies are hiring people for make-work jobs simply to be nice.
There seem to be three potential dangers with AI. One is the “alignment problem”, and I’m very concerned about that. Another is the misinformation problem, and I’m not very concerned about that; I see AI as merely a new topographical feature of the misinformation hellscape we’ve been in since the advent of the internet. The third problem is the jobs problem, and that’s the issue that I think has produced a dialogue that contains even more fear mongering and bad faith arguments than usual.
