AI and the regulation we need
This text was written by a human being. Notices like this soon will be common.
It was a rainy morning, I was without internet and I was trying to distract myself from another day wasted with work that could be done by a machine.
Like me, you must be bothered by inequality. Social differences probably existed long before private property, although it was private property that caused social differences to escape all control and common sense. I’m sure that even thousands of years ago, some clan of cavemen rebelled against their despotic, manipulative, self-serving leader.
It is easy to imagine the first terms of exchange becoming out of balance. Someone got a better land, while another lost all his production to a plague. One family had more children to work the land and another had to deal with the premature death of the head of the family. The reasons that led to prosperity and failure in the origin of societies are not necessarily different from those that affect current relationships.
Luck determines where you are born, who you are and what culture you belong to. This is already the first step for you to be rich or poor. Even if you are not lucky, you can still count on hard work. Overrated, hard work can actually lead to wealth, though not always and not for everyone. After all, luck determines even the opportunities for work and taking advantage of it.
Even if the work were fair and balanced, that is, even if things were as simple as earning more for working more, this relationship is also unfair. It is unfair because there is accumulation.
If the accumulation of goods were not possible, hardly anyone would work so hard and never have so much to the point of unbalancing society. The imbalance is greater with each generation, precisely because the accumulation allows the result of work to be transferred to the next generations. Accumulation even makes it possible to multiply capital in the same generation, thanks to the purchase of labor.
Inequality did not emerge as the evil plan of a powerful boss or the conspiracy of a secret group with macabre rituals. Inequality emerged as an inevitable and unfortunate consequence of a series of minor advances that made society more dynamic. As a whole, society has developed in the face of so much progress and so much rapid change, but as individuals, we have been separated by ever-widening chasms.
Today it is common to live with people who earn two or three times more than you, as well as people who earn two or three times less than you. It’s common, because we accept the world as it is presented to us, but that doesn’t mean it should be common. No one should accept earning three times less than anyone else. I’m talking about the difference between not being able to pay rent and having decent housing.
Meritocracy is one of the most important forces working in favor of the status quo, despite being nothing more than a collective illusion. Illusion shaped so that we passively accept that one person collects luxury cars, compared to thousands who do not own a home. Or even much more common examples, like having domestic servants clean up your own mess.
Every day we talk about traveling abroad with people who haven’t even left the state in which they were born, while we hear smiles about the mansion in a gated community of someone who has no idea what it’s like to live in a 35m2 kitchenette. This is the day to day we learn to accept.
Lost revolutions
The agricultural revolution left nomadic life behind. By settling down, societies grew and knowledge multiplied with the specialization of tasks. Even at the origin of this economic model, we missed the opportunity to build an egalitarian society, which shares the benefits of collective work and equally distributes the accumulation of grain. Instead of a collaborative model that offers economic security, we feed an ambitious model of individual enrichment and little economic security. Needless to say, little economic security is reflected in all spheres of life, which builds a frustrated and anxious society. But this is just one of many missed opportunities.
The industrial revolution reimagined the production of goods, streamlined distribution and transformed the old craftsmen who dominated the entire production process into gears in a production line, with repetitive and undervalued jobs. Now, thousands of products have become accessible to everyone, who have become consumers, as well as servants of a production system that enriches a few. The ability to multiply wealth was raised to an unimaginable level, which could have enriched the entire society, but which was once again concentrated in the hands of a few individuals. In general, in the hands of the same individuals who had already concentrated income from agricultural production.
The stock market has allowed anyone (with a little spare cash) not only to participate in the risks and profits of big companies, but also to invest in businesses they believe in and want to encourage. It is an amazing power, and one that could have transformed society and distributed some of the power of big business, but that the market inevitably turned into a betting system, complex and far from ordinary people. Day Traders (those who stay with stocks just long enough to profit from the rise), Short Sellings (those who bet on stocks falling) and many other terms to define financial market bettors, who seek shortcuts to wealth, or who take advantage of those who seek shortcuts to wealth.
Investors are ordinary people, with prejudices, passions, irrational decisions, fears and a great desire for wealth. When investors’ decisions are as flexible and free of responsibility for the companies they finance as they are today, the market becomes a puppet, driven by these same irrational decisions. Who bears the price of the bad decisions that the market makes, is society as a whole, which does not even know what the stock market is (remember the real estate bubble of 2008).
The AI revolution
Artificial intelligence came as a coup. Like all technology, it already gave indications of what it would be capable of. For years AI has shown the most attentive that it was coming and that it would be amazing. The land was prepared, but the vast majority did not expect such a drastic change.
We were used to slow and consistent advances, such as password autofill, an accurate search engine that brings useful results for searches, and algorithms that overwhelm us with unsolicited posts. But AI came along and showed that we weren’t prepared to deal with the future. We eagerly looked forward to space travel and endless cell phone batteries, but we didn’t expect to be replaced by machines. Not so fast.
It has never been easier to understand the rage that drove workers to destroy power looms in the early days of the industrial revolution. It was frustrating to discover that your workforce, the only way the economic model at the time allowed a person to be able to support themselves, was suddenly worthless. Suddenly the production line no longer needs the gears you’ve spent the last decade shaping yourself into.
The feeling is even more frustrating today, because we are not talking about repetitive and conditioning jobs that anyone can learn. We are talking about specialized professionals, extremely competent, with years of experience in the market, who become obsolete overnight.
How does it feel to be a professional illustrator who charges hundreds or even thousands for a job and is suddenly replaced by a website that does the same thing for a few dozen? The mechanical loom of our times delivers not only the work of hundreds of people, as it happened in the industrial revolution, but also the work of hundreds of very competent and qualified people.
Today, anyone can do the work of an illustrator. Some will be better at training the AI, some will be more creative in making images and using these tools, but anyone with internet access can generate an illustration equivalent to the greatest art geniuses, living or dead.
AI can already write essays, poems, songs, laws, contracts, scientific articles and whatever else you want. Does it write well? As well as a professional? Apparently not, but that’s not the point. The point is that if the AI is already able to write an essay better than a teenager doing their homework, it won’t be long before they writes an essay as good as a professional. Will we have new releases by Machado de Assis? Gabriel Garcia Marquez?
If AI reaches the potential of our greatest writers, musicians and painters, can it surpass them too? Will humanity be thrown into the corner of creativity and artistic production? Will the remaining artists be AI students, who dedicate their days to exploring the potential of this tool and raising creations to levels never imagined?
It’s an extremely disappointing scenario, but isn’t this also an inevitable step in human progress? So how was the power loom and agriculture? Money and the stock market?
ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022 and humanity simply cannot live without chatGPT anymore, which in 2023 was valued at 20 billion dollars. Midjourney was launched in July 2022 and a world without artificial intelligence image generators is already unthinkable. It makes no sense to argue whether or not AI should exist.
In the same way that today we look at the old press, so rudimentary compared to the simplest domestic printer, we can soon see hand-drawn illustrations as something outdated and limited. A text like this may sound ridiculous by future standards. In this scenario, does it make sense to fight to save jobs?
Nobody yet knows what the consequences for humanity will be of becoming irrelevant in the face of the power of machines, but we have to fight a battle we can win and this is not the battle against AI’s.
The revolution we need
Machines do the work of dozens of people, computers of hundreds, and AI of thousands. It is exponential progress and one that was probably predicted a long time ago, even if these technologies were not even imagined at the time of these predictions.
Like so many missed opportunities throughout the history of human progress, AI has emerged as yet another tool capable of multiplying the gains of a few and condemning the vast majority to poverty and servitude.
In a few decades AI will be in everything, from culinary assistants, travel agents, researchers in laboratories and, of course, artists. AI is the next leap the industry has been looking for, but it could also be the revolution humanity needs.
In the same way that today I can generate a professional cover for my next book at virtually no cost, an AI can finally reduce the costs of public transport and healthcare systems. Today medicine, for example, rests comfortably in a bubble of shortage of professionals and exorbitant salaries, but which is finally threatened by computers that can read an exam and propose treatments with even greater accuracy than a human with decades of experience.
Doctors will resist change and claim the same as artists, lawyers and all areas threatened by technology, but how long will they resist? How long will it take for patients to realize that a doctor is no longer needed for good treatment? How long will it take for people to understand that the human factor is not as important as imagined?
Humanity can and will be replaced by machines in almost every profession we know today. New professions will emerge and many professionals will be able to update themselves to remain relevant, but why does that matter? It matters because people are afraid of losing jobs. It matters because people are afraid of not having a source of income. It matters because everyone knows that the benefits gained by AI, like all the benefits we have already accrued from the Industrial Revolution and even before it, will not be distributed equally.
It is not the end of jobs that we should fear with the emergence of new technologies, but the bad distribution of the benefits achieved. When a tractor started to do the work of dozens of people, these people should not have returned to the job market as unemployed. When artists lose their livelihood to a computer, they shouldn’t go back into the workforce as outdated professionals.
It’s not jobs the world needs. This is just the reality we know of the world presented to us.
There must be thousands of ways to make AI the revolution we need, but for the shape and functioning of our current society, and for the purposes of this text, I would bet on taxes. Taxes on Artificial Intelligence can be earmarked directly for income distribution. Programs like Bolsa Família or even more ambitious projects. The regulation of AI’s is urgent and this is the opportunity we have to make them the revolution we need.
Instead of finding survival for the productive force, we must turn to the reduction of working hours. The world can build a dystopia of mega corporations that exploit a society of servants for the benefit of a few billionaires, already so hyped and romanticized by literature and cinema, or it can build a utopia where work represents only a small part of life. A utopia where life can be much more than spending eight hours a day available for a mediocre function, with leisure, study, and even art. Art for the pleasure of creating, not to satisfy clients and their tight budgets.
We can look for the world we want instead of just imagining it, because imagination is getting out of our control.
I’ve already talked about inequality in:
