One summer a University friend got a job at the St. Catherines, ON, GM engine plant.
His plant tour was by the plant’s third ever hire, who sat on a chair holding court, without doing any work. So senior the only way to fire him would be to close the plant and start over.
M’s tour of the plant was the old fart walking him around, pointing and saying:
See that machine over there? It took a man’s job.
For 40 years I’ve heard that the machines are going to replace us. Automation and the robots were going to, in the South Park phraseology, “take our jerbs.”
Unemployment statistics say otherwise. The USA has more job openings today than people to fill them so no, the “jerbs” aren’t gone.
This morning I took kid three to kids’ activity day at Home Depot and I got to chatting with a couple of guys about my new second career as a freelance writer. One asked me if I was afraid of AI taking away my work.
Short answer, no.
Longer answer. My first job I used a drafting board to modify drawings, and then I made blueprints. Tedious. Slow. Laborious. Boring.
Over the ensuing years I moved into 2-D CAD, and then 3-D CAD. The computers didn’t take my job away, they made it faster, more accurate, and took away a lot of the tedium.
That is how I view AI.
I’ve read Ads written by AI. They’re garbage. There’s information, there’s jargon, but there’s no heart, no soul, no vision. They’re so bad that someone wrote an AI to detect whether something was written by AI, with over 90% accuracy.
As long as AI lacks emotion, I think I’ll be fine, and it will be just another tool.
