The development of generative AI tools that can spit out everything from paintings to essays is the next step in frictionless technology disrupting our society. The frictionless illusion is all around us. It tells us that the complex matters of delivery services, supply chains and transportation have been reduced to an app and a few swipes on a smartphone.
In the frictionless utopia, food is delivered to your door through an app, meat is cloned in a lab and human relationships are achieved by swiping right. Electric cars magically just work, without any pollution or moving parts, much like wind turbines and solar panels. Where the achievements of the past, like splitting the atom or building a national highway system, depended on mastering complexities, postmodern technology promises to eliminate them.
To understand how massive scams like Theranos or FTX could take place, you have to live in an imaginary matrix of impossibilities where new ideas eliminate complexity rather than multiplying it. Any engineer could tell you that it works the other way around, and that simplicity is inherently deceptive, and yet the public keeps being sold on the frictionless illusion.
Then when the app turns out not to be hooked up to anything and there’s no money in the bank, the illusion falls apart and an incomprehensible panic sets in because we have mistaken the interfaces for the processes. But the panic only goes on long enough for a new set of shiny frictionless objects promising to simplify reality to be rolled out as substitutes for the old.
Cryptocurrency and the metaverse have imploded, but in their place is the promise of AI.
Among so much else, AI offers seductively frictionless art and literature. The hype, some of it authored by ChatGPT, boasts that chabots will eliminate millions of white collar jobs. That’s no doubt true. But what that really means is that American white collar workers will be replaced not by some omnipotent artificial intelligence, but by the low-paid third-world workers training it.
In the 18th century, crowds were wowed by the Mechanical Turk: a machine that seemed able to play chess. In reality, there was a man inside the machine making the moves. ChatGPT isn’t an omnipotent intelligence: it’s Kenyan workers maintaining the illusion by training it for the princely sum of $1.32 an hour. OpenAI is no less of a dystopian hall of mirrors than its tech industry predecessors who put conventional nerds like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg out front while much of the actual work was carried out by anonymous Asian and Indian workers on visas or abroad who provided the intelligence that made the software tools seem smart.
The machine has never actually replaced the man. All it’s done is shove the man deeper inside a cubicle or in a distant land while a sophisticated society gawks at a new Mechanical Turk.
Every frictionless prophecy turns out to be a clean lie hiding an ugly reality. Recycling begins as a perpetual loop of three arrows on a blue or green bin, but actually ends with 8-year-old boys climbing over mountains of garbage in Africa.
Phone delivery and ride apps connect to illegal aliens doing gig work, and content moderation at Facebook and YouTube is handled by Filipino women viewing thousands of images and videos of graphic violence and pornography an hour in exchange for what to us is spare change.
Because there’s always someone inside the Mechanical Turk. And the system is not run to the standards of whatever lies come from the girls in PR or the geeks in black turtlenecks out front, but to the third world workers who are actually hiding inside the metaphorical guts of the system.
GIGO or Garbage In, Garbage Out, is a binding principle for a reason. What goes in these is mountains of our data. Generative AI hoovered up the individual work of millions of writers, artists and just ordinary people, and then with some third-world fine-tuning, spits out a randomized imitation whose sole function is to fool us into thinking it’s original content.
The frictionless impulse is the work of men (and a few women) who believe in a singularity in which man and machine will unite to become one. This foolish posthuman delusion could only be entertained by people who have forgotten what it is to live a human life. And it could only gain currency in a society that has lost its religious and cultural bearings. And thus its humanity.
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