So says the provocative advertisement – but without my added question mark – on billboards in San Francisco – where else? Other head lines say that AI employees ‘never come to work hungover’, and ‘their computer cameras are always working’ for those beloved Zoom meetings.
Above the picture of an AI ‘human’ image – too ‘perfect’ to be a real person, which really means too imperfect – the various tag lines force your intention, which is really the point of advertising, which is what the CEO of the company, Artisan, Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, wants. One wonders whether he himself is an AI creation, AI hiring AI to do AI jobs.
Such a ridiculous paradox jibes well with Nicholas Carr’s droll remark in a reflection on a data-driven world, concerning self-driving cars patrolling the city, ‘looking for’ customers:
It’s only logical that, in cities like San Francisco, Phoenix, and Austin, the drivers are now being automated out of existence. Self-driving algorithms can carry out the necessary transactions with even more precision and efficiency. To really perfect the system, though, you’d need to turn the passengers into automatons, too. The trip would take place not on asphalt but entirely on screen, a flow of data through the mirror world.
The end point of this is a world without humans, or very few of them (not unlike elements of the climate change agenda) for they are no longer needed in a digital world which runs itself in a spinning parody of reflections upon reflections, like a barber’s shop mirror – until, like the final scene with Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey, some real human – or an act of God – unplugs the whole multi-tentacled monstrosity. Which wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
On that note, also not a bad idea to read, or re-read, E.M. Forster’s prescient The Machine Stops – published in 1909, but more relevant than ever.