Pro
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” It’s the question we’re asked from the earliest stages of our education. My mom always tells the story of going to my kindergarten open house and seeing my paper where I had scrawled “Elf” as my response to this question. From my dreams of working at Santa’s Village, to that inevitable Grey’s Anatomy doctor phase, to lawyer, economist and teacher, this question has animated the way I think about my future. I’ve found meaning in this question throughout my adolescence. It’s true– I do dream of labor.
But now, the laws of supply and demand are taking over: the unproblematic, quiet and industrious employee that is Artificial Intelligence steps into the roles that would have otherwise always gone to eager college grads. An AI bot won’t sexually harass anyone, you don’t have to feed it, it meets deadlines and it’s starting to sound like the smartest people in the office. It breaks every economic model that assumes labor to be a finite resource. In a world where we weren’t trained to find the meaning in life from work, the prospect of AI ending employment wouldn’t be all that scary.
In that world, AI performing labor would mean we could all get rich together, read books, make art or cook delicious meals. The prospect of AI taking over employment only scares us because we live in a world that normalizes selfishness and doesn’t ask us to see our lives as a part of a whole. The rise of AI forces us to face the existential and philosophical questions that we’ve been able to conveniently ignore in its absence. It invites us to think more originally about what it means to be a person. For “grinders,” which is the majority of the Hamilton student body, this is scary.
I’ve found comfort in the fact that I will one day choose a career path which will then naturally imbue my life with meaning. I can no longer rely on employment as the meaning generator for my life. I have to turn inwards. AI taking over work gives us the permission to delight in humanity for its own sake. An AI bot can’t struggle to scoop its ice cream in Commons and awkwardly pass off a condensing scooper to the next up in line. It can’t struggle to hold in a grin while waving to a crush, or cheering obnoxiously on the sideline at its friend’s sports game.
All of the awkward, cumbersome, messy but distinctly human experiences that we have all come to see as secondary, possibly even harmful, in a world that prioritizes labor above all else, is the only edge we have in the battle against AI. If nothing else, AI promises to induce the philosophical revolution necessary for us to begin to treasure our existence for its own sake, and for that, I am grateful.
Con
Artificial Intelligence perfects the act of “BSing.” If asked to polish a resume, AI can easily make the job description “server at a restaurant” sound equally demanding as “economic consultant.” Using phrases like “collaboration with cross-functional staff,” “balancing multiple priorities in a fast-paced environment” and “delivering high levels of client-service to maximize revenues,” they are practically indistinguishable. It’s a joke. I suppose we could have come up with phrases like these before, however now we have a system actually encouraging us to do so. AI systems permit us to become expert advertisers of our own capabilities. At the expense of us actually alloting the time to hone them. If you can sell anything, who cares about what you actually did. In this mess of crap, AI makes it hard to distinguish ourselves and dulls our capacities.
AI discourages us from engaging in the human exercise of sitting down and parsing through any reading or soldiering through a tedious task. There is beauty in working at a pace suited to our own mental capacities. Looking back at my freshman application to be a writer for the Spec, the awkward syntax and try-hard professionalism of my own writing makes me laugh. But, now I would never get that. AI makes it too easy to plug menial tasks and make them sound smooth and polished, but we lose ourselves with this “perfection.”
We are effectively skipping the “awkward phase” of our intellectual development. It is through stages of awkwardness and uncomfortability that we push our own mental capacities forward. It is through being forced to tough out work that we hate, we can develop discipline and concentration to thrive in fields that we love. AI curbs our own capacity to be passionate about anything, since we constantly have the option for a machine to substitute our own thinking. The goal becomes: how fast can we move on to something recreational? Through being trained to despise any task we cannot complete with haste, our tastes change since our minds trick us that efficiency equals enjoyment.
I’ve heard all of the talk and some pretty compelling arguments about how AI can perform thoughtless tasks so we can further “specialize.” This narrative forgets the fact that AI prevents us from developing the baseline skills that enable us to be effective specialists. If everyone’s IQ’s in fields outside of their own specialty have deteriorated, we lose our capacity to be versatile as individuals. Sharpness requires social skills, resourcefulness and patience. When we become accustomed to cutting corners, we slowly lose our own humanity that inherently comes with our flaws and messy trains of thought.
Additional Note: The Common Ground Dialogue will be held Thursday, October 9th, at 6:30 p.m. in the Events Barn. Dinner from Minar will be provided. Please visit hamilton.edu/commonground or contact any of the student ambassadors for more information.
