The "Robot Intern" - An Optimistic Outlook On Automation
The fear of being replaced is innate in all of us. The narrative of robot takeover is imminent; planted in our minds by mixed media or Hollywood blockbusters like The Matrix or The Terminator. The automation of a vast variety on a large scale of middle-skilled professions, including factory workers, has made the fear seem all too real. In truth, there is no reason to fear automation at all from an economic perspective. David Mendel, an engineering and history professor at MIT, states “technology is not something that happens to us, it’s something we shape and create”(Dizikes 2020). Our goal should not be to stall innovation because we fear what we do not know. Automation and technological revolutions are not new changes in our history. If we have learned anything from the rise of AI, technology can allow humans to do some impossibly extraordinary things.
Artificial intelligence (AI) commands the front line of automation, a more abstract version of a robot. AI doesn’t just do what we tell it. AI learns and adapts as a human might. Learned AI in particular has been around for some time. Applications of AI include autocorrect or Google Translate. More relevant forms of AI are the recent chatbots and artificial illustrators that seem to have a voice and thoughts of their own. Keep in mind artificial intelligence is not intelligent as a human is- it lacks subjective capabilities such as emotion or opinion. The only bias that may be present within AI is systematically programmed by the company or individual who created it. “In other words, fearing AI is analogous to fearing a concept like statistics”(Jaume-Palasi 2018).
There is little evidence that supports the idea that automation is bad for business. There is even less evidence supporting the idea that robots are here to take all our jobs without creating new ones. Investigation into the automation of the American workforce has proven that for as many jobs that robots replace, they create an equal or greater amount of new jobs and tasks–this is called the reinstatement effect. Moreover, the jobs created tend to be ones that demand higher-skill and offer more pay.
Dissecting the fear of automation, people tend to see just the first step of the process: robots replacing workers. They fail to see the second step: the new jobs those robots create. It is easy to get mad at the displacement of workers who need the paycheck and/or do not have the higher skill to get a better job, but it is proven that those low-skill or middle-skill workers become better off for it- not to mention the country as a whole. In a number of companies there is a rising incentive to educate workers through training programs to prepare them for higher-skill positions in order to reallocate and optimize the use of pre-existing human capital. This has always been incentivized but never has it been this feasible. The cost of training programs has been outweighed by the benefit. For example, automation has boosted efficiency and production which boosted profits, allowing company-X to justify expenses on training their workers. As a result, the low-skill workers who were stuck on the assembly line will now earn higher pay at a higher-skill position. In a perfect world every company would do this although that is not the case.
Automation is not a new threat. Farming has declined 75% since 1950 as a result of the industrial revolution and innovation in farming technologies. A glass half full, “U.S. farm output has grown 170%”(USDA 2021) since then as well. Anywhere you look, we are better off for innovation and automation alike. Beyond the economic benefits, automation is replacing jobs that are arguably below human capability. It is no news that working in an assembly line isn’t fulfilling work. The only negative outlook on automation is the sentiment that robots are taking paychecks from people who need them. Such sentiment is a fallacy.
The growing fear of automation is a result of the industries that AI has begun to disrupt. No longer are robots solely taking the blue-collar jobs that society deems “replaceable”, but they are disrupting white collar jobs that we thought were irreplaceable. Take the media and entertainment industry(M&E); the distinctively human ability to be creative, personal, and responsive are now abilities of artificial intelligence. One of the more prominent uses of artificial intelligence in the M&E industry is journalism. A growing number of news and media have already implemented automated journalists into their systems. “Some examples of robot journalists are Forbes’ content management system called Bertie, The Washington Post’s Heliograf, and Bloomberg’s Cyborg. These robot journalists can, for example, create storylines for football games based on some parameters and data collected from the analysis”(Dilmaghani 2023). The emergence of smarter AI, such as GPT-3 (the system that powers chatGPT), has opened up unanticipated doors for automated journalism.
Firms like Nieman Lab, who have implemented AI into their company culture, describe their use of automated journalists as a tool to boost efficiency and production, but they also identify the downsides as well. One downside is what they call “robotic repetition”, which they say is a common theme in AI-produced content–every article their AI produces has a similar cadence that almost feels unhuman. Nieman believes in human advantage so they work with a hybrid approach to automation. They use AI to create multiple potential drafts that an employee will then choose, revising the “robotic repetition”, to produce the final article. Nieman, like most journalistic firms, admits the efficiency in letting AI do the tireless, mundane work of searching for content on an overwhelming number of platforms; our world has been enshadowed by a formidable amount of information. Nieman says their use of AI has “distilled 24 hours’ worth of talking heads and thousands of tweets into a skimmable newsletter, with a short list of potential statements that might be worth examining”(Adair & Stencel 2020). They refer to their AI as the “robot intern”. An entity that will complete the busy work that no others wish to do or should be wasting their time doing.
The revolutionary use of AI in journalism, and any industry that deals with validity issues in terms of their content, is the potential solution for eliminating fake news. The ability to sift through large amounts of data is a pillar of artificial intelligence and it can be used to identify the truth or falsehood of any information embedded in a publication, news outlet, or live TV. Although the technology is close to this reality, AI does have a number of hoops to jump through before it can be used as an immovable force of good. It still requires a great deal of front/back end work such as using writers and editors to preload data for the AI or editing the output data it produces.
The rise of AI has come in conjunction with the rise of data. Powerful forces are shaping the media and entertainment industry as they are becoming increasingly disrupted by the demand for more–more devices, more social media, more shows, and more entertainment. To satisfy that more requires data processing on a massive scale. The greed of the public eye would be hard to keep up with, if not for AI. With the rise of data collection as a whole, especially at the hands of media conglomerates like Facebook and TikTok, digital data collected through entertainment is arguably the most valuable data in the world right now; the value of data even surpassed the value of oil in 2014. AI could then have the largest impact on the media and entertainment industry as the amount of user data is unmatched and invaluable compared to any other.
Another one of the emerging uses of AI in the entertainment industry is content creation. AI can automate tasks such as scriptwriting, editing, video creation, and even cinematography. The multinational technology corporation that specializes in hybrid cloud and AI, IBM, believes automation can “blur the lines between traditional forms of media and new technology”(IBM Institute) through a quasi-immersive experience. Keeping in mind that everything comes down to competitive advantage and considering the radical evolution of artificial technologies, AI is a necessary adoption for anyone hoping to create the company of the future. However, to say that companies will “employ” AI instead of content creators would be false; AI will always be a complementary means to human ends. The likes of ChatGPT or DALL-E are not advanced enough to create totally reliable content, but they can be used as a tool, allowing content creators to be much more efficient. Entertainment companies in general can analyze large amounts of behavioral patterns to better understand consumer behavior and, in turn, conduct a favorable and informed way of business/product creation.
What the evidence suggests is automation and artificial intelligence should be accepted with childish angst that plagues children who dream to fly or to walk on the moon. What we can accomplish today would be a fever dream to generations born 100 years ago. Jobs are being created that didn’t exist even thirty years ago because of automation and the modern technological revolution. So, I argue the rise of automation is not something to push against but push for. We are safe in the reality that technology will always be a complementary tool to human ends. Nothing beats the service, touch, and imperfection of human creation. Today it’s AI, tomorrow it’ll be VR (Virtual Reality), and then who knows？ The only fear with automation is the unknown, and what history has shown us is the unknown leads to the impossible, and that is something to be excited about and revel in.
References:
“Why We Shouldn’t Fear the Future of Work.” MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, news.mit.edu/2020/future-work-conference-1120.
“Why We Should Not Fear Artificial Intelligence.” 12 April 2018. AlgorithmWatch, algorithmwatch.org/en/dont-fear-ai/.
Njuki, Eric. “A Look at Agricultural Productivity Growth in the United States, 1948-2017.” Www.usda.gov, 29 July 2021, www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/03/05/look-agricultural-productivity-growth-united-states-1948-2017.
“Revolutionizing Entertainment: How AI Is Transforming the Media Industry.” Www.linkedin.com, 30 January 2023 www.linkedin.com/pulse/revolutionizing-entertainment-how-ai-transforming-media-kunal-singla/. Accessed 7 Mar. 2023.
Acemoglu, Daron, and Pascual Restrepo. “Automation and New Tasks: How Technology Displaces and Reinstates Labor.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 33, no. 2, May 2019, pp. 3–30, https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.33.2.3.
“AI and the Future of Media.” IBM, www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/en-us/report/cognitivemedia. Accessed 7 Mar. 2023.
Peiser, Jaclyn. “The Rise of the Robot Reporter.” The New York Times, 5 Feb. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/business/media/artificial-intelligence-journalism-robots.html.