For White-Collar Workers, AI Also Stands for "Apocalyptic Insecurity" (The New Republic, 4/10)

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https://newrepublic.com/article/208683/white-collar-workers-ai-apocalyptic-insecurity

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As humans fade into background and AI enlists workers in their own demise, it feels like it’s Soylent Green meets The Hunger Games: Middle-class labor is forced to eat itself. For white-collar workers across the country, the upheaval is psychological and existential as much as technological. They are grappling with what we call apocalyptic insecurity: the realization that something massive is underway but there’s no clear timeline or playbook. Everything moves at incomprehensible speed.

It’s made work itself into an uncertainty, with dark impacts on our behavior, careers, and health of mind and body. A massive 71 percent of Americans are now scared that AI will steal livelihoods. Tech leaders issue Magic 8 Ball musings: white-collar jobs gone in months; half of entry-level jobs wiped out in five years; or, depending on who’s talking, jobs will simply “transform.” But how? When? What, if anything, is the plan?

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People understand that their work—and their worth—is being dictated by AI, and they’re losing the parameters in which to succeed. Sociologist Janet Vertesi, who studies AI and robotics at Princeton, puts it like this: “We are effacing expertise instead of enabling expertise.” Giorgio Ascoli, a neuroscientist at George Mason University, says that in his field, the formative years of learning by doing are disappearing, and without that, “you’re cutting your own roots,” leaving a workforce that never gains the experience needed for the part of the scientific method that demands human capability.

Lazonick calls this both shortsighted and backward. By cutting loose the employees who carry institutional memory, judgment, and hard-won skills, companies are tossing out the very knowledge that makes innovation actually work. “For creativity and innovation to happen, you need a workforce that’s equipped, engaged, and actually has a stake in what comes next,” he says. Bots can’t provide that spark.

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Much more at the link, more examples than solutions, though there are paragraphs on workers organizing and what government should do to help - state governments if the federal government won't take action. The authors of this article - cultural historian Lynn Parramore, senior research analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and Alissa Quart, executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project - admit we have a "murky political climate" right now.

They omit the one thing individuals can do right now - educate themselves and others about all the reasons AI should NOT be used. All its myriad harms and potential harms to AI users, individual businesses, education, the economy, society, our information ecosystem, and the natural environment.

There are many more arguments AGAINST generative AI - the kind of AI we're talking about as a threat to jobs, the kind being hyped now - than there are FOR genAI. And that information is free.

Too many people are unaware of those arguments and that information. Which is unfortunate because information is power.

What everyone can do is educate themselves, their family, their friends, their coworkers, their employers or, if they have their own business, their customers. Make sure those people also know why it's important to take a stand against generative AI.

I've posted a lot about AI here because I believed - still believe - that it's vitally important that people have that information.

The pro-AI arguments are weaker than the anti-AI arguments, but you won't know that, and be able to show others that, without the information on why genAI is harmful and using it is a mistake. Information from news stories and studies. Information that's still available but is likely to start disappearing as the tech lords and authoritarians gain more power.

[highplainsdem]

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