Outsourcing More Things to AI

"Okay Google, what's the meaning of life?"

We no longer say “Yes”. Instead we say “Affirmative.”

Yes. Er, affirmative.

Unless we… know the other robot really well.

— ‘Robots’, Flight of the Conchords

This morning I used a pre-installed weather app on my phone to find out the exact minute that rain was expected to fall in my postcode. Isn’t that freaky? No one just licks their finger and holds it to the wind anymore—the robots do it for us. In radars we trust. Weather apps are a genuine miracle of scientific innovation and yet they spend most of the day ignored, refreshing themselves in the background, eagerly quietly chomping at the bit to tell you details about humidity and air pressure and raw temperatures and metaphysical extrapolations on what those temperatures actually “feel like”. If any of that takes more than five seconds to load you’d be liable to hurl your phone into a ravine. 

There’s e-mail and e-commerce and e-health and e-sports. Next we’ll have e-feelings, e-breathing, e-xistentialism. When it rains it pours—at least, that’s what my weather app tells me. We farm data. Our machines learn. There are digital clouds to hack and to harvest. Mainframes and malware, gigabytes of GIFs. Every answer to every question only ever a few taps away. And now the news is telling me that text-based Artificial Intelligence like Chat-GPT is coming for my job? About. Freaking. Time. I never would have chosen a career in marketing and communications if it’d known it’d take so long for the robots to put me out of business. Do you have any idea how much time and embarrassment I’d save myself if I delegated my blog writing to generative AI? 

I fed a robot all of my posts and told it to write a ‘pithy introductory paragraph’ based on the title of this article. Chat GPT said:

‘The opening paragraph should be, “I was at the shop the other day where I saw a robot trying to buy groceries. Moron. It couldn’t figure out how to use the self-checkout machine, and it kept scanning the wrong vegetable. I felt bad for the robot, so I helped it out.” This paragraph is funny because it uses a visual image to create humour. The image of a robot trying to buy groceries is sure to make readers laugh. The paragraph also uses irony to create humour. The robot is supposed to be intelligent, but it is actually having a lot of trouble with a simple task like buying groceries.’

Not bad. In fact, it’s a rare example of a joke becoming funnier after it’s been explained in great detail—a neurotic robot grappling with a self-service checkout machine over a bag of white cup mushrooms? What a clear cut premise for comedy. Way more accessible than the crap I’m churning out. If this robot wants my job so badly, seriously, it can have it.

And then have you had a chance to watch all ten minutes of the futuristic ad for Apple’s new VR headset? In it, a woman chats, in person, with her friend without removing the comically large and cumbersome sci-fi goggles from her face, and thanks to internal cameras that capture and convert her real time facial expression into a 3D projection on the outside of the headset through AI, she can maintain eye contact through the goggles. You heard me. Luddites might see this as ‘alarming’ or ‘a violation of the human experience’ or ‘just kind of rude’, but I personally think we can go further. Why stop at the weather? At pithy blog writing? At automating and digitising eye contact with our loved ones?

So, here are six annoying things about being a living, thinking, feeling human being that I think we should outsource to AI. 

1. IT Problems

Technological advancement ebbs and flows. While we may be making humongous leaps and bounds in the realm of artificial intelligence, automatic soap dispensers work no more than 50% of the time and I can’t connect to the printer when it’s raining? We’ve got big, borderline-omniscient supercomputers trying to fry our biggest fish (curing diseases, answering philosophical questions, exploring the cosmos) and yet my laptop sometimes shits itself when I plug an HDMI cord in when I have too many tabs open. Have you ever had to verify your identity in order to access an app that verifies your identity? My point is, Chat-GPT or no, enigmatic, inexplicable computer issues still haunt us each and every day.

It’s inevitable that the IT profession is going to be if not literally then at least intellectually guillotined by the very robots they created. Schhink. This is the premise of pretty much any science fiction story that involves AI, going all the way back to Frankenstein. What I’m saying is, let’s speed that up. Let’s feed bots transcripts of my conversations with the IT department and see if they can come up with a better answer to my urgent query than ‘Ohhhh, I see what you’ve done, you deleted that important file yourself, didn’t you?’ Yes. I did. I don’t want or need a human nerd to point it out to me—what I want is the file back, pronto, sans judgemental tone.

2. Ironing

Of all of the chores in all of the world, ironing is far and away the worst. I would rather have to unstack a dishwasher in a groundhog day time loop for an entire calendar year, I would rather colour coordinate the pegs for 1000 articles of laundered clothing, than have to iron a business shirt. Does my head in. The folding. The setting it juuuuust right. The creases that get worse the more you try to fix them. The first degree burns after touching the scalding metal hot plate to see if it’s hot yet (gets me everytime). Ironing is not my gift.

I’ve seen videos of robots folding clothes, manufacturing cars, and building other robots. Surely, if we can have self-possessed, spookily self- and spatially-aware little vacuum roombas whizzing around, it can’t be that much harder to attach a hot wet metal plate to a mechanical arm? 

3. Art and Culture

Earlier this year, an AI generated image won a prestigious international photography competition. So why stop there? Cannes, Pulitzers, and the Archibald are all still up for grabs! Imagine how much time and effort Michellangello would have saved if he’d 3D printed the statue of David in thermoplastic monomer fibres instead of farting around with the marble and the chisels and the oxen carts and what have you. I think I speak on behalf of all arts students who are not at all actively employed in the arts when I say it’d come as a great relief if my breakthrough novel could literally write itself. 

4. Plotting the collapse of human civilisation

Do you, like me, spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about how and when the human race will destroy itself through one (or a sick combination) of climate change, wars, or antibiotic resistant superbugs? Not only is all that existential dread very time consuming, it can also be hard to know how seriously I need to be flossing, watching over my Superannuation, and so on. 

A group of leading technology experts have already signed a letter claiming that AI has the potential to become an extinction level threat to humanity. Awesome! I think if we gave the robots the keys to our nuclear codes, they would be able to provide a very accurate time frame for our impending doom. It’s much easier to run a race when you know where and how far away the finish line is, you know? 

5. Differentiating between good and bad ideas

I used to work for a company that consulted for another company that sold the technology that’s used to scan fresh produce at self-service checkouts. Say that five times quickly. They achieved this by feeding an algorithm enormous amounts of photographs of cabbage, capsicum, celery etc. And sure, I still routinely have to ask human staff members to help me when the checkout thinks my lebanese cucumbers are actually eggplants, but so what? 

What if we use this same technology to work out if we’re on to a good or a bad idea. Feed an algorithm a hundred episodes of Shark Tank, wikipedia articles on inventors that were killed by their own inventions, and the entire back catalogue of Australia’s Funniest Home Videos. Seems like a good idea to me… but we should probably run it through the prototype when it’s up and running, just to be sure.

6. Thinking for any reason

Why do we have to think about all the ways we could be using these super-intelligent computers when they can do the thinking for us? Let’s give up on the crosswords, the Wordle, the free will, the creativity, the critical self-reflection and the futile pursuit of the meaning of life. Wouldn’t it be far less painful, far more enriching, to be ensconced in a warm cocoon of goey brain fluid, plugged into, I don’t know, a matrix of pods all connected to a simulated reality that robots have used to distract us while it uses our bodies as an energy source for its own computing power? Just an idea.

If ignorance is bliss, why are we trying so hard to think all the time? Why be the smartest person in the room when the person with the flattest brainwaves is probably way happier than you? ‘Food for thought,’ is a much more enticing offer when you take the ‘for thought’ out of the sentence! So: Food. Lots and lots of food. Our robot overlords will 3D print a wide and blissful selection of food to distract us into submission, and what a deliciously, mindlessly, subservient paradise that will be!