The Age of the Button Pushers: Will AI one day take over our jobs? The answer is not what you expect

By Herold Vesperi

The future of our jobs is not a mystery. It is the result of a transformation that started a long time ago. It is obvious, clearly understandable, but well hidden behind of curtain of confusion. This book starts from the most asked question: "will AI take over our jobs?" In order to show how misleading it is. Misleading are also all the alarms raised over the power AI, but the real dangers could have even more deleterious consequences, leading to an era where the masses could be trapped in jobs that are alienating, mind numbing and underpaid.
Exposing the arguments in a manner understandable by the layman, The Age of the Button Pushers goes trough the fields of computer science, economics and media communication. The whole picture will be reconstructed taking into account the lessons from the past with the changes brought by the industrial revolution, the present with the consequences of automation, the near future with the risk of an economy dominated by monopolistic giants. Part of the book will be dedicated to all the fabricated stories that dominate the current narrative on the media, highlighting the flaws and the inconsistencies, showing how altogether these stories paint a picture that makes absolutely no sense.

• Language: English
• Publisher: XinXii
• Release date: Mar 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9783989836266

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The Age of the Button Pushers Copyright © Herold Vesperi March 2024

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

ISBN (eBook): TBD

Edited by Herold Vesperi

Cover Art "Operators embedded in the machine" by Herold Vesperi

Self published by Herold Vesperi

Contact address: [e-mail]

ISBN: 9783989836266

Verlag GD Publishing Ltd. & Co KG, Berlin

E-Book Distribution: XinXii

www.xinxii.com

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AI Cannot take our jobs

many people say,

"It is not smart enough

to do our jobs" they insist.

Thus they talk

‘cause they still don’t know

how dumb will be

their future jobs.

Table of Contents

Preface

A note about the notes

Whom this book is for

When this book was written

Introduction

An introductory example

How intelligent is AI

The elephant in the room

The two processes

Centralisation and urbanisation

The redundancy of the skills

(Almost) Every field is opening up to unskilled workers

Business Process Management

Crowdsourcing

Advanced logistics

Baxter the robot

Factory automation

Creative destruction, the hard way

The parallel with the industrial revolution

Could mass skilled labour come back one day?

The Media And The Utter Confusion

Margaret Thatcher and the unions

The improbable danger of an emergent AI

The legend of the tipping point

The confusion around LLMs and AI

The comforting stories

The Myth of creative destruction

The Myth of creative destruction has a new version

AI will drive economic growth by reducing the cost of everything

Workers augmentation

Creativity

Progress will always bring higher living standards

One day we will work only three days a week

The big machine

The digital transformation

Big data

Outside the big machine

When nobody is to blame, but an inanimate algorithm

The trouble with energy

The McDonaldization of society

The looming decline

Disclaimer

Preface

A note about the notes

This book was written as a reply to the absurdities and contradictions that characterise the stories and the narrative that surround us every day. Here there are many claims that go against that narrative, so much that as I was writing I found it difficult to find usable sources or references that reported the facts without tainting them with biased opinions. What is written here is a summary of thoughts and findings that I accumulated over many years while I had to make big efforts to extract the facts from everything I read or heard, not only from the media, but also from books, manuals and lectures and everything that is online and offline communication.

I also noticed that people many times are invited to think in a critical manner and check the sources of whatever they read, then they are pointed to other sources that do not report the facts, but preformatted opinions. Eventually it all ends up in a phoney exercise where the reader is invited only to check whether preformatted opinions coming from different sources match each other. Many questionable claims stand on a network of self serving sources that confirm each other. To get a rough idea of the problem it is enough to look at the story of creative destruction and the myth that the industrial revolution in Britain created as many jobs as it destroyed. So many sources repeat the story that now many economists write about it as if it was taken for granted. What actually supports the myth is the number of times it has been repeated. In contrast the chapter about that myth in this book is the only one that is not supported by any source, the only way to verify what is written is to find the original research and review the data it relied on.

I reconsidered several times the situation and eventually I decided to take the opposite approach and put no references in this book. I understand that the choice I made ends up shifting the burden of the proof on the reader, therefore I invite the reader not to take what is written here at face value, but as food for thought. In some cases the contradictions in the mainstream narrative are so stark that it will not be difficult to find the bare facts and derive a reasonable conclusion. In other cases it will take some investigation to cross check the arguments, I invite the reader to try and dig into it as deep as they can. Moreover I invite the reader to keep in mind that critical thinking is not about reading some different preformatted conclusions or questionable information from different sources and see if they match. Critical thinking is about reasoning with your own brain and questioning the credibility of the facts against your own education and experience.

Whom this book is for

This book is aimed at a general public. Many concepts have been exposed in a manner accessible to the layman. However the arguments included discuss ideas coming from the fields of computer science, economics and media communication. Expert readers might find some parts boring and some parts telling details they never noticed before. Eventually everybody regardless of their skill and experience might get from here some useful insights.

When this book was written

Some arguments of this book are meant as a direct reply to the current narrative that dominates the media. This narrative can change very quickly therefore it is better to clarify that the bulk of the writing of this (the first) edition happened between April 2023 and February 2024.

Introduction

The question has been lingering around for more than a decade. It bugs the mind of millions of people, it keeps a lot more hanging. Young people see in the question their future at stake, older people are worried, journalists are alarmed, experts see it as a defining issue. The whole structure of the future society might depend on it. But, is it really worth to ask it?

The question is merely asking: will artificial intelligence one day take over our jobs? Like any yes or no question asking something about the future, chances are that the complexity of the real world will elude the question and deliver a third option. In this case just by observing how things are evolving, the direction that has already been taken by the technological evolution, we can see that a third option is way more likely. We can also see that the most likely outcome is bleak. If it were possible to represent the ages by different colours or different tones we could say that we already saw the nuances changing around us. We can already paint the future scenario without invoking the help of the crystal ball. So close and so evident it is, that with a close and careful look the question itself appears as nothing else but a misleading riddle. Good only to distract the attention from the consequences of the automation and digitalisation of our society compounded by the massive deskilling of people's jobs.

The present is between the years 2023 and 2024, the location does not matter, it is just one of the many corners of the world that did not escape the unstoppable advance of the Westernised economy, culture and obsessions. This book will look into the promises that Artificial Intelligence holds for the future and it will throw some cold water on many of them, but then it will state that it does not matter, changes will come with or without AI. The impact on our society will be harsh, but since the changes will happen in a slow, continuous flow, they will catch a lot of people off guard. Like people, taken by surprise by the inexorable flow of time, suddenly find out they have grown old, many will suddenly find out they are stuck in an unpleasant role in the newly formed society. There will be no prophecies though. Not even bold claims, just the observation of the actual reality.

Three will be the main arguments taken into account and discussed. The false alarms about AI sounding all around, what is actually happening, the confusing image created by the media that prevents people from seeing the real situation.

At this point a warning is necessary. By choice this book will not make any proposal to address the future problems. The purpose of this book is to inform people, not to create new delusions, it will avoid the classic American style of the books that start with gloomy predictions and end with a rosy tint. In this book there will be no happy ending.

An introductory example

To illustrate what I mean by the third option I will start by making an example and for it I will use the most famous example of artificial intelligence, the self driving car.

In the past ten to fifteen years a lot of more or less automated vehicles covered thousands of kilometres of road, the most advanced of them managed to go through difficult off road terrain to complete the much publicised DARPA challenge. But there is a small detail that is always glossed over. No matter how good modern AI can get at understanding the surrounding environment. It is not going to match the knowledge of a normal person, not even a 20 something unskilled person. All the images and all the sounds coming from what is on the road and what is beside the road in order to be understood must be matched against an extremely varied knowledge. A knowledge that humans accumulate during their life in many different ways, by direct observation, by study at school, by reading books or articles and watching movies. The software that is called AI can be powerful and sophisticated, but it is a specialised tool with an understanding of the world limited to its own context. Those who train the AI must foresee any single scenario the car might find itself in or, at least, this is what they try to do. In reality it is almost impossible to teach to the AI any single example of an incredibly complex reality, therefore they simply try to collect as much data as they can. Beyond the complexity and variations of the existing world, there is another reason why it is impossible to teach them a complete knowledge. The training of AI tools is done by showing examples, taking actions and correcting the errors. While the education of a human is a mix of examples and abstract concepts. It then includes abstract situations that might require long descriptions and eventually abstract explanations. Humans may recognise difficult situations they knew only in theory, but they never saw before. This kind of education is something that what we call Artificial Intelligence would not understand. Not even the most advanced example of AI, the LLMs, can build up enough knowledge to properly understand every possible situation in the surrounding environment, let alone a set of specialised neural networks designed to process images and drive a vehicle.

Given the situation is it reasonable to expect that an AI trained to drive a car or a bus is also trained to recognise exotic animals? What will happen if suddenly on the road appears a dangerous animal escaped from a zoo or a circus? What will the self driving car do?

Maybe that to illustrate my example I am choosing a situation that is too strange, but even less strange situations might be a problem. An accident blocks a road and a worker or a police officer puts some makeshift signs to indicate to the vehicles to take a detour. The same scene may appear in thousands of different forms. Since what we call AI is still unable to understand the meaning of what it sees, it can learn what to do only if the scene it gets is very similar to a scene it saw during the training. Training it to recognise all the possible variation of a makeshift sign is impossible. In the best case it would stop waiting for instructions, in the worst case it would ignore the sign and drive into the road block.

What about a landslide falling on the road, will the car understand that it must ignore the speed limit and escape as fast as possible? Will a car getting on a falling bridge understand that it must put the reverse and leave it? How to react to a burglar who is trying to enter the vehicle?

I know that I am making a lot of