Humans may have just struck AI for real but they simply can’t win | Mint – Mint
American screenwriters have just won a historic battle against artificial intelligence (AI) after a 148-day strike by the Writers Guild of America (WGA), representing 11,500 screenwriters. The writers wanted AI like ChatGPT to be used only as a tool to help with research or facilitate script ideas and not as a tool to replace them. History would mostly remember it as a watershed moment in human civilization where the WGA won the first major union contract that created a real, enforceable framework governing the use of AI. The contract ensures that AI is not regarded as a “writer,” that companies can’t compel writers to use AI, and that they must disclose if they provide writers with any AI-generated content.
Here, we see humans striking against AI—not in science fiction, though. This was unavoidable at some point given the extraordinary advent of AI. When ChatGPT was introduced a year ago, there were widespread fears among technologists, economists and academics that it would cause significant job losses. This isn’t surprising. When a new technology storms in, many jobs are lost; that’s the history of human civilization. They are typically lower-level employees, though. But the technical advancement of ChatGPT also posed a threat to the white-collar workforce. Many college-educated employees who produce content, such as playwrights, teachers, journalists and programmers, are worried that ChatGPT may render them obsolete. And, in fact, AI has started to replace many jobs.
I was reading an interview Daniel Kahneman, the 2002 economics Nobel Prize winner, gave to The Guardian in 2021. We hadn’t been shaken by the ChatGPT revolution until then. Kahneman believed that although technology is evolving very quickly—possibly exponentially—people are linear. Evidently, “when linear people are faced with exponential change,… AI is going to win,” Kahneman asserted. “How people are going to adjust to this is a fascinating problem—but one for my children and grandchildren, not me,” he added.
It’s true that at least in the foreseeable future, AI won’t be able to perform many tasks as well as humans. AI comes with built-in restrictions. For instance, in a March 2023 opinion piece for The New York Times, Noam Chomsky and his coauthors called ChatGPT and its ilk “a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question.” The human mind, in contrast, is “a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information,” seeking “not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.”
Nevertheless, AI excels in many areas. Additionally, since it just requires the expenditures of acquisition and maintenance rather than wages, benefits, holidays, it may be in employers’ best interests to use it. Mark Hughes, in a May 2023 Forbes article, wrote AI will soon be largely superior to human executive leadership. At that point, a board of directors might start to consider if using AI at those executive levels would be best, saving tens of millions of dollars.
Hamilton Nolan stated in The Guardian on the screenwriters’ strike: “The writers won. They can get back to work for a while. Sooner or later, I promise, they will get to fight some more.” What Nolan omitted to say was that the struggle would ultimately be hopelessly lost since AI would continue to advance in its natural “exponential” manner. A few decades ago, when computers began to permeate our daily lives, there was tremendous opposition in certain societies due to concerns over loss of jobs. Possibly, they don’t even know when they stopped fighting in this conflict that can never be won. Many new types of jobs, however, emerged in-between.
When machine intelligence reached the stage where it could surpass human intellect on 11 May 1997, it marked a turning moment. Garry Kasparov, one of the greatest chess players of all time, was defeated that day by IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue. He became the symbol of humanity’s fight (and defeat) against the machines.
But Kasparov gained insight from his defeat. He looked into the future of intelligent machines and noted the bright possibilities in his 2018 book, Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins. Kasparov believes mankind may soar to new heights with the aid of our most remarkable inventions rather than be afraid. “Romanticising the loss of jobs to technology is little better than complaining that antibiotics put too many gravediggers out of work.” It’s said that the history of civilization may be summed up as the transfer of labour from humans to our inventions.
Yes, if the screenwriters seek to win by keeping AI aside, they will eventually lose the battle. Kasparov suggests that embracing AI’s ability to augment human capabilities is a better approach of combating it (in all facets of life) than complaining that the machine is superior to us in some areas. And therein may lie the beginning of wisdom. At this terrible crossroads in human civilization, we, the children and grandchildren of 89-year-old Kahneman, have to deal with this intriguing dilemma. Pertaining to our existence and excellence.
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