TITLE: Living with AI in a World Where We Change the World to Accommodate Our Technologies
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 11, 2022  9:09 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:

 My social media feeds are full of ChatGPT screenshots and speculation
 these days, as they have been with LLMs and DALL-E and other machine
 learning-based tools for many months.  People wonder what these tools
 will mean for writers, students, teachers, artists, and anyone who
 produces ordinary text, programs, and art.

 These are natural concerns, given their effect on real people right
 now.  But if you consider the history of human technology, they miss
 a bigger picture.  Technologies often eliminate the need for a certain
 form of human labor, but they just as often create a new form of human
 labor.  And sometimes, they increase the demand for the old kind of
 labor!  If we come to rely on LLMs to generate text for us, where will
 we get the text with which to train them?  Maybe we'll need people to
 write even more replacement-level prose and code!

 As Robin Sloan reminds us in the latest edition of his newsletter,
 <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/new-avenues/">
    A Year of New Avenues</a>,
 we redesign the world to fit the technologies we create and adopt.

<blockquote><em>
 Likewise, here's a lesson from
 <a href="https://fat.gold">
    my work making olive oil</a>.
 In most places, the olive harvest is mechanized, but that's only
 possible because olive groves have been replanted to fit the shape
 of the harvesting machines.  A grove planted for machine harvesting
 <a href="https://fat.gold/guide/#growing-olives">
    looks nothing like</a>
 a grove planted for human harvesting.
</em></blockquote>

 Which means that our attention should be on how programs like GPT-2
 might lead us to redesign the world we live and work in better to
 accommodate these new tools:

<blockquote><em>
 For me, the interesting questions sound more like
 <ul>
 <li> What new or expanded kinds of human labor might AI systems
      demand?  </li>
 <li> What
      <a href="https://ooo.ghostbows.ooo">
         entirely new activities</a>
      do they suggest?  </li>
 <li> How will the world now be reshaped to fit their needs?  </li>
 </ul>
 That last question will, on the timescale of decades, turn out to
 be the most consequential, by far.  Think of cars ... and of how
 dutifully humans have engineered a world just for them, at our own
 great expense.  What will be the equivalent, for AI, of the gas
 station, the six-lane highway, the parking lot?
</em></blockquote>

 Many professors worry that ChatGPT makes their homework assignments
 and grading rubrics obsolete, which is a natural concern in the
 short run.  I'm old enough that I may not live to work in a world
 with the AI equivalent of the gas station, so maybe that world
 seems too far in the future to be my main concern.  But the really
 interesting questions for us to ask now revolve around how tools
 such as these will lead us to redesign our worlds to accommodate
 and even serve them.

 Perhaps, with a little thought and a little collaboration, we can
 avoid engineering a world for them at our own great expense.  How
 might we benefit from the good things that our new AI technologies
 can provide us while sidestepping some of the highest costs of, say,
 the auto-centric world we built?  Trying to answer that question is
 a better long-term use of our time and energy that fretting about
 our "Hello, world!" assignments and advertising copy.
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