It's All Over!
Dear Wags,
Sarah is binging a new show. The series is an adaptation of The House of Mirth, starring her favorite actress, Selena Gomez, set in contemporary Cleveland. Sarah originally cast Idris Elba as Lawrence Selden, the male lead. Something about the Elba avatar didn't work for her, so she replaced him with James Dean. A chip in Sarah's brain then exports this data to her friend Tariq. He recasts the narrative to suit his tastes, shifting the action to the desert planet Arrakis, because he is obsessed with Dune.
In the future, a version of this scenario will play out, presuming a tiny minority still knows who Edith Wharton is. Crude forms of it are already commonplace. All the things that confine human imagination — labor, time, inspiration, other people— are minor hurdles for artificial intelligence.
What I’m writing can be imperfectly replicated but executed much faster by tech that exists only to please me. At least initially, it will fumble elements of personal style. Yet the more we provide data to childlike iterations of AI, the more they mimic us. This is the dazzling future of the creative economy or the end of civilization. Maybe both.
Not long ago, I talked to a Dartmouth student who blandly classified today’s professional class as knowledge workers. It wasn’t a compliment. Knowledge workers—suckers who pursue white-collar gigs in law, academia, journalism, entertainment, medicine, etc.—are those whose capital rests on knowing stuff.
For a very long time, knowledge workers were ascendant. They did not make lowly objects, they were paid to think! Knowledge workers populate our elites, direct our corporations, and ask why West Virginians don’t just ditch their coal mines. If you are still reading this, you may be one of them.
If we are to judge from newsletters and podcasts, knowledge workers are very anxious about the future. It’s hard to overstate the potential of AI to upend the economy, particularly parts reliant on the soft skills of liberal arts majors. Knowing stuff, as opposed to doing stuff, is losing some value. The list of fields that AI can disrupt is long. At the moment, robots are unlikely to replace you if you are a physical therapist or a plumber. Give them time.
This isn’t all bad or all good, but it demands attention. Right this second, AI is best appreciated as augmented intelligence. You have a presentation to give, and ask your compliant bot to spit out three options. It does the grunt work lickety-split, but it’s a toddler, making flubs as it learns. The Hollywood Reporter asked ChatGPT to generate a 30 Rock script about the current writer’s strike. It did so in 15 seconds. The only problem was it wasn’t funny. Yet. AI gets better in a blink, which is why even Elon Musk wants to take a beat.
The primary concern here is not that robot intelligence will suddenly develop consciousness and turn on us. That old dystopian scenario — We ask AI to eliminate human suffering, and, aiming to please, it extinguishes humanity — isn’t imminent.
Short-term hazards come in anodyne efficiencies. AI may liberate knowledge workers from accustomed labor. Perhaps that will unlock untold human potential. But if the experience of industrial workers is prologue, we ought to be concerned. If we exist only to distract ourselves, we can make loads of mischief.
If nothing else, busy work has been a civilizational distraction. In the United States, the workplace as much as any place functioned as a critical social venue. It is where we encounter people not like ourselves. This social function is every bit as important as economic drivers. Tech is swallowing it, just as it did leisure time.
Why should we care? America’s history of creating so-called third places, those venues outside of home and work, is spotty. In the absence of truly public space, secular enterprise filled a gap. In addition to providing us with offices and malls, it funded civic institutions — symphonies, universities, museums, and libraries—through mass employment capitalism. These pro-social venues weren’t just gifts from friendly billionaires, but the fruit of human labor.
The efficiencies of AI are miraculous. But they are likely to accelerate the decline of work and communal space, marooning us at home. Human beings are social creatures. AI is the latest in a chain of transformations that delude us into thinking we can dispense with physical society.
Yet the more technological innovation milks our tendency to flee reality, the unhappier we become. If the pandemic tested what it would be like to live without ever having to leave the den, we failed.
The internet is no substitute for tangible interaction. Starbucks, which actually hyped itself as The Third Place, can’t pick up the slack. In the interests of communal health, we are going to have to design a society that nurtures relationship and purpose outside the work paradigm. Americans are not great builders of piazzas. Yet the more we keep our drawbridges raised, the dodgier shared environments become. Ask people how they feel about dropping their kids off at school these days.
For all their promise, AI and associated innovations draw us further inward. We are at the cusp of a revolution of living and the imagination, which may atomize individual spheres so much that we’ll be able to avoid one another forever. If we hide on holodecks, curating fantasy realms that fit us to a tee, we risk becoming further unmoored from shared reality, culture, and language. Everything we understood our world to be — schools, workplaces, nation-states— is at risk.
Elements of that atomization are well established. When Kellyanne Conway spoke blithely of alternative facts in 2017, she horrified our knowledge elites. What she said wasn’t new — people want to be confirmed in their views and America is riven by ideological feuds. But it underscored that reality is contested.
Now, imagine a world in which AI drives narratives faster than ever, tailoring fact sets not just for Fox Nation, but to every fickle, selfish brain. The decay of common ground has wreaked havoc with knowledge systems. Highly individualized informational anarchy would be far worse.
Up until this point, culture-making has been a group project. Culture is built not because we have a few geniuses here and there, but to sustain audiences. We know who Shakespeare, Jay-Z, and even Charli D’Amelio are as a result of exchange.
America turned culture-making into an industry employing thousands. Much of what it produces is lousy, but some of it is sublime. Crucially, these products are created for the benefit of one, but millions. What you dream up in your head may be far better than Succession, but that is a small part of it. Storytelling is formed by its constituencies. It engages and enrages diverse groups.
From ancient mythologies to today, narrative is a social adhesive. AI promises to flood the world with billions of new myths. If we’re making like Joseph Campbell, we could argue optimistically that they will all be variations on the old ones. But the digital content economy demonstrates that information produced at mind-boggling rates doesn’t spark enlightenment. It produces Babel.
The Hollywood writer’s strike is an early skirmish between knowledge workers and their challenged overlords. Strapped corporations will try to cut costs. CNN, Simon & Schuster, and Warner Bros. are line items on balance sheets, not sacred cultural assets. But media companies, venal though they may be, buttress third places. They create apertures for sharing. What affects them affects the culture, and what affects the culture affects us all.
Hard-pressed studios, music labels, and publishers see cost benefits in AI-driven creativity. Early examples—in art, porn, and an approximation of a Drake song— have an uncanny valley quality to them. They are mildly interesting and a bit creepy. They will improve. It’s very expensive to mount House of the Dragon. If you could order one up ideal script, locations, costumes, and cast, and ship it out at minimal cost, you’d be tempted. Would it be any good? That’s rarely stopped entertainment executives.
Such decisions will be made in deck chair shuffling moments. Our content enterprises are adept at cranking out storytelling, but they’ve lost the mass audience. The labor-intensive systems that produce and monetize narratives cannot be underwritten without it. Desperation is setting in.
You can pray for the next George R.R. Martin to save you, or you can try to program him. As we’ve written before, movie stars who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s still draw large audiences because they were the last generation of performers to benefit from truly mass media. Perhaps AI will give us licensed avatars of J.Lo and Tom Cruise to entertain us in perpetuity. And why stop there?
This helps explain the show of cooperation among creatives, agents, and other mortal stakeholders during the WGA strike. Automation is upending the culture business and human workers are pushing back. They will win important concessions. Much bigger shifts — refer to the first paragraph — are on the way. Hollywood is losing ground not just because of a few bad calls but as a result of tectonic movement.
Resisting this change is quintessentially human. Pushback— not just from high-profile technologists and policymakers but a diverse representation of our species —will influence AI’s development. Activated knowledge workers may well blunt its impact on cherished industries.
Of course, authenticity matters. It is a high-value commodity. Buyers prefer a real Matisse to an approximation spat out by DALL-E. However polished AI becomes at aping our creations, we may still favor work wrought by human hands. In the future, consumers could pay premiums for products certified as 100% human-made.
The nature of what we make and share inevitably changes, but mutual literature, art, and music have always distinguished cultures. The loss of that communion would be a tragedy beyond words. Yet look how disconnected we have already become.
AI may free us from drudgery and unlock new potentialities — tapping the Spielberg, Plath, or Basquiat tucked in the recesses of every biologically derived brain. Even if those artists hide inside us, brilliance means little without a vibrant human audience.
