Philosophy instructor, recreational writer, humorless vegetarian.
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Bullshit AI Jobs

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Last week we heard the latest installment in the prophesized AI jobs apocalypse.  This time, it was Dario Amodi, the CEO of Anthropic, who told Axios that “AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years” (italics original).  Axios adds: “Imagine an agent writing the code to power your technology, or handle finance frameworks and analysis, or customer support, or marketing, or copy editing, or content distribution, or research. The possibilities are endless — and not remotely fantastical. Many of these agents are already operating inside companies, and many more are in fast production …. Make no mistake: We've talked to scores of CEOs at companies of various sizes and across many industries. Every single one of them is working furiously to figure out when and how agents or other AI technology can displace human workers at scale. The second these technologies can operate at a human efficacy level, which could be six months to several years from now, companies will shift from humans to machines.”  The piece then argues that this will be different from previous technological disruptions because of the speed with which it will occur.

Someone should tell that to the workers placed out of work all-but overnight by the development of machinery in the nineteenth century, as detailed by Marx (who helpfully notes in the Machinery chapter in Capital that the drive to full, steam-engine driven automation is motivated by the inability of capitalists to extract any more surplus value from over-exploited workers).  One should also remember, with Jathan Sadowski, that these sorts of proclamations are in part designed to create their own reality, such that “the power of expectations can have a disciplining effect on what people think” and that “the capitalist system is designed to pummel us into submission, preventing us from imagining life could be any other way, let alone allowing us to go on the offensive” (The Mechanic and the Luddite, 196, 207).  When Axios adds that “this will likely juice historic growth for the winners: the big AI companies, the creators of new businesses feeding or feeding off AI, existing companies running faster and vastly more profitably, and the wealthy investors betting on this outcome,” one can thus hardly be too surprised.

Here, I want to take a slightly different angle however, and think a little bit about the kinds of jobs that are supposed to go away.  It’s hard not to notice the parallels between the Axios list and this one:

“We have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.”

That list is about the jobs that appeared when automation took away factory jobs, and it’s a list of jobs that even those who do them often cannot explain why they exist or need to be done – what David Graeber called “Bullshit Jobs.”

After reflecting a bit on the moralizing source of this phenomenon – “work has dignity!” – and the psychological damage it does to be told that work has dignity when you know your job is pointless, Graeber concludes:

“If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it's hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3–4 hour days”

In a paper in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Adorno Studies, Fabian Freyenhagen, Anastasios Gaitanidis, and Polona Curk reflect on Adorno’s thoughts on psychoanalysis.  For Adorno, the 19th century repressive regime (where my socially unacceptable urges have to be sublimated into something productive) has been replaced at the social level by a sick normality; in Adorno’s words from Minima Moralia, “the regular guy, the popular girl have to repress not only their desires and insights, but even the symptoms that in bourgeois times resulted from repression” (MM sec. 36, qt. p. 20).  As Freyhagen et al summarize, for Adorno, “the punitive superegos had tended to give way to weak egos, in which even the symptoms of the repression of desires are repressed because conflict itself is prevented by the available prefabricated gratifications” (23).  They offer an updated diagnosis:

“Today’s predominant modes of existence embody — literally, rather than consciously —the awareness that one’s importance as an individual to the economy of unhinged shareholder capitalism is gone. The experience of the majority is one of increased replaceability, even disposability. As a result, one’s individuality is gradually dismantled. Persons feel like ghosts, zombies, neither alive nor dead. The mode of existence in higher echelons is hardly better. Fancying themselves more important on the individual level, they are submitted to 24hr-availability, maddening competition, and a perpetual push towards self-improvement to increase their value to the system, until they are, ultimately, only able to keep going with the help of extreme distractions and various addictions. They too sense that there is no safety net, leaving everyone a misstep away from seeing their quantifiable “value” in the neoliberal system depreciated” (24).

Under these circumstances, “therapy itself becomes about management of this state, of self-structure, of perpetual and continual crises: an active intervention rather than psychoanalytic work proper.”  Whether or not this is a good reading of Adorno’s reading of the value of psychoanalysis, I want to notice that it does read like a psychoanalytic account of the sort of damage that knowing your job is bullshit can do.  In other words, Freyhagen et al’s account is deeply congruent with Graeber’s.

This leads to something of a paradox.  The jobs that AI is supposed to do are largely bullshit jobs, and the proliferation of those jobs is both damaging to any notion of dignified work and the product of previous advances in automation.  As Graeber says, “it's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.”  We can plausibly expect that AI is going to be pretty good at those bullshit jobs, because an awfully high percentage of its training data consists in the effluvia of bullshit jobs, and (let’s face it) a lot of those jobs are basically the same.

So what happens when we learn how to automate not just making stuff, but bullshit?  One scenario, is that the jobs apocalypse isn’t coming in the manner advertised.  On this scenario, it turns out that people are better at bullshitting than even machines that are known for their bullshitting.  At least some bullshit cannot be merely adequate! There’s also growing support for regulations that keep “humans in the loop” of AI systems, even when it’s pretty clear that the humans are there either as liability sponges (people to blame when the systems fail) or just to make sure somebody has a job.  Evidence in support of this sort of hypothesis is that AI superintelligence isn’t, and that a lot of AI hype is based around the desire to raise venture capital (Sadowski is very good on this point).  The actual systems themselves underperform, are still based on crappy training data, hallucinate all the time, and so on. 

Another scenario, visible only if you ignore the marketing hype around AI and realize that it depends on a vast sector of exploited humans to prop up the systems with such tasks as data labeling and reinforcement learning, is that sector of precarious folks will expand.  Given that the economy depends on consumption, one assumes that there will be more bullshit to do, fairly quickly, and that those assigned to do it will need even more active intervention.  Those jobs will likely become more precarious.

A better idea, which (therefore) seems a lot less likely to actually happen, is suggested by Amodi: “every time someone uses a model and the AI company makes money, perhaps 3% of that revenue ‘goes to the government and is redistributed in some way.’” (UBI?) That’s actually an idea worth thinking about, but since it would be bad for the Silicon Valley capitalists, we can safely assume it won’t come about unless they perceive that the alternative is their utter destruction.  That might happen, because widespread unemployment tends to fuel authoritarian populism (good news – AI can facilitate authoritarianism, so crisis averted!)

The one thing that won’t happen is that anybody will get to work 3 or 4 hour days.  That’s because “these technologies are not merely corrupted by global capitalism, they are created out of it, to serve its interests – that is, the interests of the people who control the capital needed to build, scale, and use these technologies in really meaningful ways” (Sadowski, 121).  To find somebody who aspires to use the productivity gains of machinery and automation to free up people for leisure and higher pursuits, you should probably start with Marx.

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istoner
12 hours ago
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Saint Paul, MN, USA
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Roundup

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Obscure words from the personal collection of Eric Albert, from a Word Ways article in November 1988:

agroof: face downward
amphoric: resembling the sound produced by blowing into a bottle
benedict: an apparently confirmed bachelor who marries
bort: the fragments removed from diamonds in cutting
callipygian: having shapely buttocks
charette: a period of intense group work to meet a deadline
clishmaclaver: gossip
crepitaculum: the rattle of a rattlesnake
famulus: a magician’s assistant
favonian: like the west wind; mild
formication: the feeling that ants are creeping over one’s skin
fucivorous: subsisting on seaweed
genethliacon: a birthday ode
gobemouche: one who believes everything he is told; literally, “one who swallows flies”
Grimthorpe: to restore a building badly
illth: the reverse of wealth: ill-being
kittly-benders: thin ice that bends under one’s weight
nevermas: a time or date that never comes
nixie: a piece of mail that can’t be delivered because it’s illegibly or incorrectly addressed
quavery-mavery: in an uncertain position
supermuscan: greater than that which is typical of a fly

Albert gives his sources in the article, but I find all the words above in the Oxford English Dictionary.

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istoner
11 days ago
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Just last month I read Catch-22, which includes the word callipygous, which I had to look up. Is there a word for seeing the same obscure word twice in short order?
Saint Paul, MN, USA
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“The bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in...

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“The bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema — and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong.” (I was slack-jawed by the end of this.)

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

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istoner
17 days ago
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This is a fun one.

"To put this in terms of mammals, it’s as if a two-toed sloth climbed up to Bill Murray’s window, howled like some unknown species of canine, and Cameron Diaz identified the howl as a sea otter, saying that sea otters live in only one place on Earth: Carmel, California."

It includes an unexpected detour into the early history of American conservationism.
Saint Paul, MN, USA
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A Day’s Work

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Memorable passages from the pulp detective stories of Robert Leslie Bellem (1902-1968):

  • “There were tears brimming on her azure peepers, and tremulous grief twisted her kisser.” (“Forgery’s Foil”)
  • “She wrapped her arms around my neck; glued her crimson kisser to my lips. She fed me an osculation that sent seven thousand volts of electricity past my tonsils.” (“Design for Dying”)
  • “And then, from the doorway, a gun barked: ‘Chow-chow!’ and I went drifting to dreamland.” (“Design for Dying”)
  • “The rod sneezed: ‘Chow! Ka-Chow!’ and pushed two pills through Reggie’s left thigh.” (“Murder Has Four Letters”)
  • “Against a backdrop of darkness the heater sneezed: Ka-Chowp! Chowp! Chowp! and sent three sparking ribbons of orange flame burning into the pillow.” (“Come Die for Me”)
  • “From the window behind her, a roscoe poked under the drawn blind. It went: ‘Blooey — Blooey — Blooey!’” (“Murder on the Sound Stage”)
  • “From the window that opened onto the roof-top sun deck a roscoe sneezed: Ka-Chow! Chowpf! and a red-hot hornet creased its stinger across my dome; bashed me to dreamland.” (“Lake of the Left-Hand Moon”)
  • “From the front doorway of the wigwam a roscoe stuttered: Ka-chow! Chow! Chow! and a red-hot slug maced me across the back of the cranium, knocked me into the middle of nowhere.” (“Killer’s Keepsake”)
  • “A while ago you mentioned my hardboiled rep. You said I’m considered a dangerous hombre to monkey with. Okay, you’re right. Now will you come along willingly or do I bunt you over the crumpet till your sneezer leaks buttermilk?” (“Murder Has Four Letters”)
  • “A thunderous bellow flashed from Dave Donaldson’s service .38, full at the prop man’s elly-bay. Welch gasped like a leaky flue, hugged his punctured tripes, and slowly doubled over, fell flat on his smeller. A bullet can give a man a terrific case of indigestion, frequently ending in a trip to the boneyard.” (“Diamonds of Death”)
  • “‘Dan Turner squalling,’ I yeeped. ‘Flag your diapers to Sylvia Hempstead’s igloo. There’s been a croaking.'” (“Come Die for Me”)

“From the doorway a roscoe said ‘Kachow!’ and a slug creased the side of my noggin. Neon lights exploded inside my think-tank. … She was as dead as a stuffed mongoose. … I wasn’t badly hurt. But I don’t like to be shot at. I don’t like dames to be rubbed out when I’m flinging woo at them.”

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istoner
22 days ago
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"Tremulous grief twisted her kisser" is a good sentence.
Saint Paul, MN, USA
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The Cat and the Glass

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istoner
27 days ago
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Saint Paul, MN, USA
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Requiem for a POB

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One of the great traumas of my youth, as my mother tells it anyway, was when a favorite brand of gummy bear oatmeal was discontinued. It was one of my favorite breakfast treats, and learning that it was gone -- and gone forever -- was devastating to my tiny brain. I was heartbroken; sufficiently so that this calamity is still spoken of in the Schraub household thirty-plus years later. It did eventually come back when I was teenager, but by then the magic was gone.

Fast forward to the present, and one of David's favorite contemporary treats is Dole's pineapple orange banana juice (or "POB", rhyming with "lobe"). I had this off-and-on as a kid as well, but my true love affair with it didn't begin until I was an adult. It is a beautiful mixture of the holy trinity of smoothie fruits, and having it in my fridge is tantamount to being able to get a delicious smoothie whenever I want. Since David loves smoothies, this is a major selling point.

Unfortunately, POB has become increasingly hard to find.* And today I deigned to ask someone at the grocery store if they had it, and he said it had been discontinued. I don't know if he just means only that store no longer carries it, or it's no longer produced anywhere, but given my trouble finding it at any of the myriad grocery stores near my house, I fear the latter.

Upon getting this news, I remarked to my wife that this was even worse than the gummi bear oatmeal fiasco, because I'm an adult now and "there's less time". She replied "doesn't that mean it's better?" And I just want to explicitly trace out both of our logics here:

  • My idea was that less time is "worse", because there's less time for someone to reproduce the product and return it to the grocery shelves.
  • Her idea was that less time is "better", because I'm closer to death and so will have to suffer for less time.
Grim.

Anyway, I am heartbroken. Bring back POB!

* I have no idea if this is anything Trump and/or tariff related -- I'm actually inclined to doubt that it is -- but I'm happy to blame him for it anyway. If other voters can crankily decide every bad thing in their life is the fault of the incumbent party, why can't I?

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istoner
31 days ago
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Mine was Chocolate Teddy Grahams Breakfast Bears. At the time, I couldn't believe they were discontinued. Now, I question why they ever existed.
Saint Paul, MN, USA
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