AI Panic and Human Work – Sarah Rose Siskind 2/5

Sarah Rose Siskind and I talk about AI panic, job loss, and the work robots should actually take from us — the dirty, dreary, and dangerous tasks that keep humans from doing more human work.

We trace the messiness of past revolutions, from manufacturing and the internet to self-driving trucks, and ask how to stay compassionate with people caught in transition without pretending technology should stop.

Transcript

Pablos: People don’t talk about it in a positive way, but I think one of the positive things that comes from computers and robots doing all the menial shit is that you get some humans available.

Sarah: Yeah, humans can do the human thing.

Pablos: Can take care of humans and can be there for you. I think it would be an amazing thing. Imagine maybe it takes a decade or something, but imagine if you had a future world with these things like Ibogaine. Where you have a systematized set and setting scheme where people can you could bring a war veteran or somebody with PTSD bring them in sit them down and you’ve got people around who have the time who are trained to know what to look for to know how to help you out like shamans do or did to be able to guide you through that we’re going to be able to really help people

Sarah: Oh my gosh

Pablos: In a way that’s just

Sarah: And people don’t realize this I was in a room filled with 60 plus women recently and they were talking about the prospect of nursing homes and they were all saying like how so many nursing homes are looking into robotics how sad is that and i’ve worked in robotics and I raised my hand and I said how many people in this room would rather a robot over a human help you go to the bathroom and everyone immediately was like, “Okay, actually, I understand.” And I was like, “Humans will help you human. Robots will help you with, as we like to say, the Ds: the dirty, the dreary, the dangerous.”

And that is the way to sell them. A robot’s not going to be telling your daughter a story. That would be insane.

Pablos: Yeah, we have iPads for that.

Sarah: I understand why I’m so fucked up now. No, she’s awesome. You don’t deserve her. Anyway,

Pablos: The iPad gets all the credit. I’m a terrible dad. My iPad was amazing.

Sarah: The story in her mind, probably. This is the biggest misconception about technology that drives me crazy. And this is probably not applicable for the listeners because I’m surrounded. You probably have super techie listeners. I’m surrounded by creative types all day. And the biggest message I want to tell them is that robots and machines and AI are going to take over the parts you don’t want to do so that humans can be human. I have spent so much more time with my baby son than I ever could have in another generation where I need to manually fill out all the invoices for my team. I spend more time with my son.

I’m like the only mom on the planet who is not sleep deprived. And it’s amazing.

Pablos: Yeah, it’s amazing. Who wouldn’t want that?

Sarah: And as I’m holding him, I don’t have to look away. I can put on advanced voice mode and just be like, what is going on with his toe? Why does it look like it’s going to pop up? Oh, that’s a hair tourniquet. And there’s a solution. Not even breaking eye contact with him. I’m troubleshooting issues. I’m communicating better with him. I’m understanding, like, why is he arching his back? And I’m able to better process what he’s trying to communicate to me. And it’s just this technology is so misunderstood. I’m surrounded by people who are hysterical in their disgust of this stuff and it’s exhausting.

Pablos: I believe it. I feel like a lot of times I’m just a volunteer therapist for people’s feelings about AI.

Sarah: Really? You feel like even in your world?

Pablos: It’s a different level in different ways but it’s normal. You have to be a little bit compassionate with people, I think, because none of us know the bounds. We don’t know where this ends. We don’t know where it goes. And we’re all trying to figure it. To me, that’s the most exciting thing ever. I’m like, oh, my God, it’s a frontier we can explore. How far can we go? Could it go here? Could it go there? That’s where you’re, where your optimists and your technologists and everybody are centered. We’re like, oh, my God, it’s going to do amazing shit.

And then on the other side of that, if you have greater risk aversion, if you’re a natural-born pessimist, if you’re, I don’t know, maybe Russian, all the major psychiatric conditions. All the major psychiatric conditions. If you end up in a situation where you’re, and a lot of it is incentives. If you’re worried about, if you think, holy shit, this is going to fuck up my career path that I’m heavily invested in. And to be fair, a lot of career paths are extremely specialized, especially in science and in engineering. And so people have invested in making themselves very narrowly defined. And if that narrow thing is threatened, then you’re almost in a panic mode. You can’t think about the cool shit that’s going to happen with babies and their moms.

You can only think about, like, holy shit, I’m going to be fucking broke. And so I think there’s this, and artists are feeling that, of course. And so there’s this kind of panic set in. And I think that part of it is a personality disposition. Part of it is a side effect. But I think that these things can be navigated, but they kind of need to be navigated on a very individual basis. And that’s why you can’t just give one blanket statement of like, don’t worry, guys, it’s all going to be cool.

Sarah: Can I share with you a secret just between you and me and nobody else? Since you’re a volunteer therapist i have a really tough time sometimes empathizing with the people who are nervous about job security because nobody shed a tear for the cab drivers who ceded control to lift to the okies in Oklahoma who were farmers and had to leave the Dust Bowl to the hunter gatherers in the ice age like we are related to so many amazing people who adapted to change that made something like absolutely futile and that should be a source of pride humans evolved the vet like Homo sapiens won the species war because we’re adaptable the dinosaurs aren’t here anymore and the fact that people bitch and moan like firstly it’s just flat out people bitch and moan.

Manufacturing is not coming back to America. Get over it.

Pablos: But we’re going to have robots do it.

Sarah: I agree. But the thing is, I am much more sympathetic to the manufacturing people because they’re blue collar. It’s much harder to adapt when you have fewer resources. What grinds my gears is the media. The media bitching and moaning. They have the megaphones, so they’re the ones talking about it the most. They are the people with the most resources they are people who do jobs that people would do for free because they enjoy them nobody like enjoys manufacturing cars and the bitching and moaning that these people at the New Yorker can’t work these multi six-figure jobs because AI is going to replace fact checkers and like streamline things and get people their news quicker and better i’m not having a hard time with that. I am. I should, because I should have more empathy. I’ve taken enough psychedelics. I should have more empathy.

Pablos: The way to think about it is, it can be both. On one side, you can say media is an industry that’s only been around for 100 years. Anyway god did not create it you don’t have an entitlement to work in that field that can all be true and at the same time you can still be compassionate with an individual with any given person i have a great amount of empathy for them if not empathy at least sympathy for them where i can understand you’re going through some tough thing and i and i’m like that with anybody no matter what the reason is it doesn’t matter if it’s because a robot took your job or it’s because you got unlucky in the cancer lottery So I think that’s the place to look for the compassion is in these individual relationships and on a personal basis.

And we can still be right about the fact that we don’t need taxi drivers in the long run. Now, I think maybe a tear probably was shed for an occasional taxi driver. But inappropriately, like it’s like, oh, you lost your taxi job and now you get to be a Lyft driver. And that’s probably better for you. No medallion system. I think, as far as I know, no taxi driver or person who wants a job driving can’t get it like anybody in the world who wants a job driving can get it now and it’s taking us decade or two to put that to for that to run its course and to put those folks out of a job for those jobs to disappear it’s going to take a long time to build enough self-driving Waymos to put all these people out of a job.

And so I don’t think the transitions have been nearly as bad as the catastrophists make them sound. I remember tracking this with self-driving trucks because for almost 20 years now, we’ve had these headlines that self-driving trucks are coming, truck drivers are going to be put out of business. That’s where labor unions come from. Trucks are going to be on fire. And right now there’s still like 100,000 open truck driver positions in America. There’s not a single truck driver that’s lost his job to a robot. There’s like one self-driving truck and it’s sort of remote control as like a demo.

And it’s going to take forever to build enough of these trucks to displace them. Anybody who’s got that job can work out their career and retire. I don’t know a single teenager who wants to be a truck driver. And that’s the disconnect. And so people need to sort of, if they want to have a rational understanding of how these transitions are happening, look at examples like that, understand them, stop catastrophizing and say, look, there is going to be a transitional period. We’re going to end up in a place that’s better. We’re going to have to put some effort into helping the people who are displaced along the way.

For sure. I don’t argue that at all. But to catastrophize about it and say that we should somehow cinch down on these coal mining jobs because people really need coal mining jobs.

Sarah: Where was the whole concern for safety about these jobs that was there like five minutes ago? Now everybody is obsessed with like coal mining and manufacturing. And you’re like, didn’t we have a whole opioid crisis because these manufacturing jobs caused crazy back injuries? Why are we bringing that back? I was not really around for the internet revolution in a meaningful way. And so I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the industrial revolution and the internet revolution.

Pablos: As my daughter says, I’m from the 1900s. I can totally just clue you in.

Sarah: I see it very much in the 80s, 70s, yellow sunglasses. Or maybe that’s 90s. There’s a big range I can see. Anyway, you have an interesting aesthetic. I thought, in my head, the Industrial Revolution was a simple zero-to-one, like life got better. And if you look at the history of all revolutions they actually tank standard of living for a little while like the agricultural revolution way back actually significantly decreased the average age span like the longevity of the average human being and it took a long time to come back up after hunter-gatherers hunting gathering was way more healthy like once we became domesticated there were diseases and droughts so you look at the industrial revolution and it’s like oh my gosh huge child labor that is not as safe as farm work there is pollution oh my god incredible pollution we have no idea what we’re doing then you look at the internet revolution which i also thought was like oh yeah dot com millionaires everyone’s happy pets.com and it explodes but it’s fine because they’re all safe now and they’re boomer homes i’m like i thought that was all gravy but then i was talking to our mutual friend ted barnett who was one of those dot-com explosive guys. And he was like, “No, it was really scary. Lots of people lost their jobs. It was really hard for us.”

Pablos: Everybody did. San Francisco was turned into a ghost town.

Sarah: What the heck

Pablos: Yeah i was there and i like but i was in oakland in 2000 2001 early 2001

Sarah: I was like nine.

Pablos: Oh, you lived? Okay, I see.

Sarah: And I was, Oakland was like the murder capital of America. But there was this promise still. There was like the hangover of the 60s in the Bay Area. And then there was this futuristic promise that I overinflated in my head and assumed that everyone was actually doing great. And so, my business has actually not been doing well. Last year, this year has been better. But last year we had a lot of people—major clients—be like, “AI is so crazy. We don’t know. We can’t. We’re gonna… holding patterns, basically.”

Pablos: That’s right

Sarah: I lost so many clients. I do science communication work. I help with tech companies—web series and speeches and social media and stuff like that. And all of these people were like, we don’t know where this merry-go-round is going to stop. We’re going to cut all expenses.” And I was like, but wait, this is the bicycle for the mind. What’s going on? And so I’m not asking anybody to shed a tear for me at all, but I am surprised at how much pain and suffering goes into revolution.

Pablos: I think that’s an amazing exploration for you to do. And most people never will. But yeah there’s a there’s a cycle to these things and that’s part of why i think the people who i can’t speak for the people who are there for the industrial revolution but having absolutely lived through every part of the pc slash internet evolution there’s definitely a ups and downs to it and whether we all experience them even if we don’t understand them and don’t understand all the dynamics. And so we kind of, it does weather you. You do have an expectation. This last year that you described with the merry-go-round, we don’t know where it stops.

It’s real hard to place a bet. Even if I’m going to open a taco wagon, I need to know that I’m in a spot where people are likely to keep coming for a couple of years that are hungry. And if I don’t have any way of, And I need to know that 47 other taco wagons don’t get to be on the same street. Because I’m spending a lot up front and investing a lot to make this happen.

Sarah: Oh, my gosh.

Pablos: And last year, nobody could set any constraints. We’re like, holy shit, which constraints can we count on? You need constraints to build. You need constraints in a business. You need to know what you can count on. You need something to anchor to. We didn’t know what that could be last year. We’re getting a sense of it this year. And I think by next year, we’ll probably, I’m not saying we’ll know all the bounds, but we’re starting to get a sense this year of like, oh shit, there’s bounds, but they’re way the hell out there. And so, and it’s okay.

Even if they’re way the hell out there, you can place bets once you know where they are.

Sarah: We’re already placing bets in our software use. I have two subscriptions that I’ve lapsed that I’m trying to debate about. One is Otter, AI, and that’s like a transcription service. I’ll just talk about this. I’ve been using Otter AI transcription for three years now. They have so much data of mine.

Pablos: Oh, interesting.

Sarah: But I get free Gemini transcription. And so I’m trying to decide for my company, should we switch to Gemini? This sounds like a really boring thing, but I think this is emblematic of a larger industry where it’s like, I’ve put all my eggs in one basket, but it’s a safer bet to go with Google because Google is making it harder for my note taker to join my Google Meets. And so there’s this, I think Thomas Kuhn called this, or did you alert me to this term? It’s called pre-consolidation turbulence. It’s that phenomenon in a revolution where there’s all these individual actors popping up. Nobody knew Open Claw. Now it’s a thing.

There are all these new companies. But we’re starting to, it’s really like, I can’t take a bet with my whole company.

Transcript

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Thanks, we need good co-conspirators.