Love, Labour, and Language

AI won’t change what it means to be human. We need to prepare for what's actually coming.

I’ve noticed that a certain type of writing irritates me more than others. If something’s obviously poor, it slides me by, and, if it’s good or validates my beliefs (is there a difference?), I get a warm feeling that quickly fades. What stay are insights powerful enough to change my thinking, and what get jammed between my teeth are the ones that should but miss the landing.

Writing on Wittgenstein and AI (as one does) in Commonweal last week, Alexander Stern made the useful point that Wittgenstein made the point that language, particularly for the young, doesn’t so much as act as a signifier for objective things as it does as a vehicle to link us with each other -- that communication is an act of connection more than it is an act of description.

The point is profound, and when we allow ourselves to think about what we really do with words, it also, at least to me, feels intuitively powerful. When I talk to my wife or child, yes, there are often things I’m trying to accomplish (put on your shoes!), but the vastly more significant purpose, and why we choose how we speak to those we love, is simply to be together.

So, language is certainly more than mere description or instruction. That’s nice.

But that doesn’t then exclude the functional uses of language. Spend time working in the business world or writing code and it becomes clear how useful it is to reduce language to the crassness of a delineated task.

Talk to an experienced software engineer and you’ll learn how radically they’re changing what they do. They typically haven’t surrendered their pride in the craft of writing elegant (or ugly but useful) code, but, now, more like a partner at a professional services firm, they’re using language to induce machines to produce more language to get things done, and, because so much of what gets done in modern work is done digitally, the power is rather intoxicating.

And so we have language, generated by humans and machines, received by humans and machines, both furnishing the profoundest bonds and executing pathetic tasks, and this reality seems to elide an awful lot of people when it comes to talking about what AI will do to our world.

Stern is right that we’ll continue to want connection with each other -- what a funny thing to write, why wouldn’t we? -- and at the same time we’re going to automate an astonishing amount of work -- if it can be captured with language, it’s susceptible.

And those two facts will be as deeply intertwined in this era as operating a steam engine and grousing with one’s neighbour were in a previous era. People, to the extent their agency allows, will still choose who they want to associate with in their work and I will assuredly unleash any machine that lets me ignore the administrative details of my life without steering my family into a ditch.

The fantasy that work might be entirely taken over by machines is all a bit silly. Someone needs to take the blame (or the credit) for whatever the machines do -- otherwise, what’s the point? The deeper question is about who’s in charge, who benefits, and what happens to everyone else as we build systems this catastrophically destabilizing.

We’re in for a ride. If what I’m seeing in the world of software extends similarly to other areas of working life (and I think it will), we’re going to feel the forces against our skin. These may be matters of degree, but degrees can be severe.

We’ll still work. We’ll still have our humanity. And, as a Jay Caspian Kang wrote not long after ChatGPT showed up, we’ll still fuss about what someone has to say, because it’s fun to be mad at them for saying it. It’s time we stopped acting like human nature is in the balance and started properly asking how we’ll care for each other when everything is upside down.