Caption: Vengeful chat-bots confront their distraught creator*.
Do you remember Singularity? Not long ago, IT people were reverential about the word, often prefacing it with “The”.
“The singularity refers to the point in time when the development of robotics and intelligent machines will become uncontrollable. In this scenario, artificial intelligence will be able to surpass the brain power of humans and will be able to evolve on its own.”
Parenthetically, IT’s hubris is revealed in its use of a term deliberately aligned with the far more weighty and time-tested terms of
subsidiarity and
solidarity!
Recently we’ve heard a lot about AI; not only will you lose your job but you may be enslaved or eradicated by the bots.
Karel Capek’s 1921 play, R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots) ends just so, but ironically, with some aspiration among the surviving robots to become more human a la a Garden of Eden re-do.
Most of those making these dire predictions do not see it as exactly imminent; rather the end date is from a few years to a couple of decades off.
But doomsday is nigh, be assured.
Indeed,
take a look at the fortune cookie industry. It is now divided between those saying only humans can write fortunes and those who are all on board with chat bots spewing out fortunes like “Beware—the machines are coming for your job.”
Permit me to put on my tinfoil hat.
AI has already begun it’s elimination of humans.
Take a look at recent job layoffs for the IT industry. “More than 140,000 U.S. tech employees were laid off in 2022. As of March 2023, more than 100,000 U.S. tech employees have lost their jobs this year.”
That’s nearly a quarter million people without jobs.
Some will bounce back into lower paying work, others will endure the vicissitudes of unemployment. Some may not.
Were these workers in fact redundant, never needed? Who’s making the decisions and does AI play a role?
I now remove my tinfoil hat.
As early as the mid 1990s I was acutely aware of AI’s insinuation into my field of work, research libraries.
In 2015, I looked back on it in my essay “
The World’s Information Desk”.
By that time libraries of all sorts, not just research libraries, had lost to Google well over a quarter to a third of their information desk business.
Back in 2000, Google’s co-founder,
Sergy Brin had some lofty aspirations: “In five years I hope (search engines) will be able to return answers, not just documents.” “… Google will be your interface to all the world’s knowledge – not just web pages.”
Looking back, Mr. Brin does appear to have attained much of his target to become the World’s Information Desk.
For many years libraries were the only show in town. Often, we held a region’s unique copy of a book - only accessible through our card catalog - and if you needed help even with simple informational questions you came to or phoned the library.
Librarians were genuine intermediaries or gatekeepers.
With the introduction of e-resources libraries began to lose their monopoly on information.
Preceded by the World Wide Web experimentation of Mosaic, Yahoo and Google soon made information (and sometimes, answers) readily available to anyone with an Internet connection. One student observed back in 1998, “(The Internet’s) moved library resources to my desktop.”
So, how did libraries respond to this erosion of what was clearly the bread and butter of their business?
A colleague told me: “It seems like all we did (at her library) was to re-act to whatever came our way.” My colleague was yearning for action, not reaction.
So, how did leaders respond? Initially there was denial. As I said earlier I was one of a few who observed that the long lines at the reference desk were no more. Even though there had to be fewer questions along with less demand for our services, we continued to staff the desk as if nothing had changed.
When I did a simple calculation showing that the costs in answering those decreasing questions were now increasing, that still did not garner much support.
Or, maybe our denial was attributable to simply not knowing what to do, either at the service level or in the executive suite. In any case, I got the feeling back then that this was a taboo topic, only to be aired at some very real personal risk.
Let’s be clear.
I am not hyperbolizing the Internet’s role in information finding and using. It’s swell, up to a point. But, to test googling’s limits, type in a complex question.
Unless you intend to always keep life simple, you will not get instant answers to your questions. There’s an avuncular bit of advice passed on by bright college seniors to college freshmen: “befriend a librarian.”
That’s still a very good idea whether you are on or off campus. If libraries have lost the bread and butter piece of their business, they still have the main course – the meaty part. That’s the ability to help users navigate and find answers to complex questions.
Such was my thinking in 2015. Now in May of 2023 with predictions of imminent doom and gloom from AI and its chat bots, I am less than sure.
But, I am not hopeless. There is plenty of evidence that chat bots are less than stellar and that, now and then, they fail utterly.
Much of that failure may have something to do with IT people’s attitudes and that there’s some amount of biased data in the metaverse.
Anonymity among many internet users has led to some horribly tainted certainty in their “truth”. That bias and negative attitude is in much of the data in the metaverse.
The bot can’t figure it out – what’s legit, what’s biased, what’s fake, etc. - so will humans have a mediating role?
I hope so.
* Actually this is a still photo from Karel Capek’s R.U.R, 1921 which I referred to my blog in September of 2015,
"I wish I was managing robots."
_______________
My book, Fables for Leaders –
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And, for the human worker yet not made redundant by AI, there’s,
Buy here.

© Copyright commentary by John Lubans 2023