AI and Industrial Revolution
1893, the world is in turmoil as the industrial revolution passes through the masses as an invisible force that shreds all sense of purpose and utility, replacing it with the graces and gifts of an awakened era. A newness spreads along the fields and pastures of Europe, taking with it the novelty of the past era of romantic nostalgia and finesse, and replacing with it the concept of modernity and strength. Edvard Munch paints “The Scream”, an iconic picture that depicts the mortal horror of enlightenment dread, of one human against a landscape, nothingness and everything, terror and strife, of one mind wrapping itself around the sticking hate that comes from adapting to changes outside the current understanding of an organism’s ability. A fate so destined, it tears up the ground underneath the feet of the unaware, the culmination off the forces of technology and work compounding on itself until the world shores up and rips out a new beginning for the population still thriving there. Doling out a new reality that all one could do is what Edvard Munch did and put it down unequivocally strange a picture of a figure crying, with the torment of slowly understanding the world will change and twist around us to bring in the developments we are all sought out to know. Enlightenment.
Slightly earlier, a precursor to all this, was the invention of the first lightbulb. Like a flash in the darkness, a streak of pure phenomenon, the world was forever split down the middle by a tool so pure, that nothing could be the same again without it. The loom. The printing press. Horse drawn carriages, and ultimately the car. All inventions never to crack the world the same way again after their introduction. The original results of these things so numerous and varied that the time shortly after their introduction, the boon to some, and the fear of others another ticket in the great cascade of sweeping changes that only industrial revolution can provide.
Fast forward to 2022, a date so recent that we haven’t even come to terms yet about what this one year will mean to our world and the generations after it. The first AI chatbot is rumbling underneath a system so fissured and worn from fatal emergencies, plague and change that one regressed to a place of harmless stupidity to avoid the consequences of what our greatness had done to the world. As AI woke up, the standard responses rained in, the threat to the livelihood of others, check. The consequences to our safety, double check. But what was not being noticed was as the first members of generation Alpha were already in the womb, there was a thinking machine that had its first sleepy eye on the state of our humanness, and our relationship to work as we know it. All standard definition for industrial revolution, like when the hydro electric dams went into the eastern North American mountains, watching the hill billy and the harmless peasant all rush out, AI was to be introduced into our system in a way so sudden and cruel, it was certain to be the destined future of our kind, and the solution to what those who had been toiling on progress deemed ‘unnecessary human labor’.
For the first time in my almost forty years of life, I had to stop. Stop because it could do what we could do but better. Stop because the pain and tortured I had put myself through on the nature of work was now suddenly, not relevant. When a species is stuck on the same point for long enough, we get very good at competing for what we think will put us above the other, the labor in art and design had become a proudful thing, like that old baroque painting of the past, long, delicious, and time consuming. Borderline slavery in the name of decent art and design. Suddenly, that had been labelled ‘work’, like an accountant’s work, and made unnecessary. How could this be? Me? My labor was now done in seconds compared to hours and all that I could do as person up until then was add flourishes and niceties on top of swarming mass of hurt and confusion, that was what I was, that is what I was put on the planet to do. This was my work, my everything, what would ultimately make me, and what would ultimately pay my bills.
They obsoleted consciousness, and if not so, very close to it. Up until 2022, the machine could make certain things faster, that’s all it could do… instead of days, hours. But now? Seconds? There is no overturning a breakthrough that over whelming. The last time the had transformed the speed of something from days to seconds was the internet. And this, was just a continuation of such. Worker’s revolution? Well, we had to come up with a reason why some of this would be considered work again, just to have a revolution, after all, if a machine could do it, why would it be? And of course there was still a place for the old way, just like there is still a place for hand knitted sweaters in a era that can get that made overseas and shipped to North America in the time it would take somebody to dye enough wool to even start. That’s when the changes happen, when something, like the painting before the photograph, still beautiful, still relevant, but alas, now an extra instead of the only.
Extra. Human work, like administration, art and design, coding, all a bygone means to the creation of these AI machines. Now? Just as we needed the wheel, to get to the cart, which eventually transformed into the car, we have a machine that can be your best friend, a better boss, a better reader, and a better family member. And just like ‘The Scream’, those of us born without us cannot handle the strength of such a powerful turn in history, and our awakening from the drudges of slavery that was once considered proudful labor, our pain as a living creature.
Industrial revolution it could be, and the times as we knew it were changing so fast and so completely, it made every moment real, like truth. Instead of sleeping, people started waking up. Oh, this could really change the way we saw it. Education? A sector long plagued with corruption and falsities now satisfyingly challenged. Was I actually smart because I had a degree, or did we just strongly favor an age-old process that stacked the world in its favor, hollowed and rotting on the inside? Did we really need to know those certain processes, or was that, back in the old days, the way the had to do it, like black smithing or hauling water? Was I about to find out that I was either obsoleted forever as a worker, or was I freed from a type of consensual slavery that we called the workforce?
They obsoleted story telling? But how could something so genuine and pure be another bad thing, even if it did come out of the voice of machines? As the world grapples with yet another profound shift in our capabilities, are we less equal now that it can be done by ‘it’ and not ‘us?” Or have we figured out that the goal posts that we set, the qualities we aimed for, were just painful ways of creating separations, classes, worth and ultimately terror for each other, all in the name of success and progress. Now, if a machine can be us, well maybe it’s time to take a break from whatever pyramidal suicide that was. Isn’t it?
