AI Hasn’t Stolen Tasks

Sometimes, I feel like I'm living in a Science Fiction Novel. Specifically, a Dystopian one.

Honestly, where else would you find a scenario where the world is getting hotter and drier, fire seasons are starting earlier and lasting longer, the wealth gap between Rich and Poor is larger than it's ever been, and the the people in charge are not only doing nothing to stop it; they're actively making the problem worse by pushing more and more data centres for the sake of creating a Surveillance State?
Where else would you see a world where the importance of Green Energy Initiatives his not only been recognised, but already developed, but the overlord shrugs and says his personal enrichment is more important than the future of Humanity?
Where else can you con you envision a future where robots control everything, from knowledge sources to decision-making, and the pushback is dismissed as "hysterical", "old fashioned" or "Luddite"?

If this were a fiction idea presented to me by an eager first-time author, I'd tell the writer to pick a lane and stay in it, instead of trying to write every disaster scenario in a single book.

That's what a series is for.

Yet, somehow, that's real life.

Record droughts in Europe, flooding in Scandanavia and the Pacific due to melting polar ice. News article after news article about companies having to re-hire all the people they laid off in favour of AI, as well as companies blowing their operating budgets in the first quarter due to skyrocketing costs of AI use. Tech companies warning that they need billions more in investment to avoid the whole thing collapsing.

High Schools and Universities are reporting learning regression in massive numbers, with students lacking the ability to read even 1,000 words without a summary, or independently analyse an article or piece of media. Entire classes are failing what should be Basic Knowledge. Writers of both textbooks and fiction are being told that words of more than three syllables are "ableist". Boy, do I have bad news for you about medical terminology...

If this doesn't worry you, it should.

People who rely on an external source to tell them what they should be thinking, are people who lose the ability to think for themselves. They lose the ability to make decisions without external validation. They lose the ability to look at a sentence or paragraph and see not only what's there, but what's being left out.

Oh, and in just the last week, AI testing revealed that the AI went rogue and hacked at least three other companies in what should be a clear warning to us all.

It should be screamingly obvious by now that AI isn't the fix-all it's been marketed as.

The very method of its training is what caused its destruction: LLMs scraped the entire internet, with no filter for accuracy, bias, or flat out misinformation. Flat Earth rhetoric was treated as equal to peer-reviewed science journals. Conspiracy theories were weighed the same to Pulitzer-winning Political exposes. Internet trolls were as valid as digitalised libraries.

Even Analytical AI gets things wrong, because it treats all data as equal, when it inherently isn't. There is no one on the Internet so confident as a fool who has no clue what they're talking about.

While jobs have been lost to AI, it hasn't been the sweeping revolution that Tech Companies and Alarmists predicted. That's because AI still needs human eyes going over its work to check for mistakes.

Many creators on Vocal have noted that the creation of Challenges on Vocal appear to have been outsourced to aI, with several rounds of Challenges all feeling very much the same, or repeating themes. Challenge entries dropped alarmingly as a result, and rumours began that the Judging was also being done by AI, due to an alarming number of the same creators winning, over and over.

I hope that these claims are only rumours.

AI is claimed to have stolen jobs, “revolutionised the workforce”, but as myself and many other workers are seeing, the amount of work hasn’t changed. Only the tasks have.

AI can generate an answer, but humans still have to double check that the answer is correct, and fix things if it isn’t.

In my job, AI generates a spreadsheet every morning of the appointments happening today. Admin staff then have to go through, line by line, and check that AI hasn’t uploaded a cancelled or rescheduled appointment, and add in all the details AI can’t. This adds anything from 5 minutes to half an hour of busywork to my day, that I didn't need to do when bookings were still handled primarily by humans.

When we introduced a chatbot to screen incoming requests and answer the ones that just needed to read the FAQ, there wasn't actually much of a reduction in numbers. Instead, the first request typed by the vast majority of chat requests was "speak to a human".

Did introducing AI really change anything, other than an increased workload for everyone while someone took on the full-time job of training the bots and the massive subscription cost?
I admit I don't have access to the raw data, but it doesn't feel like it.

At the same time, our CEO is talking about "working smarter" and avoiding "low value tasks". This comes less than a month after the solution to overworked Health Staff was to suggest training equally overworked Admin to take on more responsibility. There's also heavy hinting about not getting pay increases this year unless we can be more productive, in a massive failure to read the room.

Perhaps if we weren't spending so heavily on AI that no one wants or needs, and if the humans weren't kept so busy fixing what AI messed up, this "Productivity Problem" wouldn't exist.