Joe Hildebrand: Tech-strong AI armies want to take your jobs

If we are going to behave like robots it only makes us all the more likely to be replaced by them, says Joe Hildebrand.

It is impossible to imagine the world as it is today without the industrial revolution. Indeed, without it the world as it is today would not exist.

And yet when the industrial revolution happened it was met with a counter-revolution, angry and fearful displaced workers who smashed up the newly mechanised cotton mills of England that had stolen their jobs.

They proudly called themselves the “Luddites”, after an imaginary 18th Century firebrand called Ned Ludd, but today the term carries a mark of shame – backwards folk who refuse to accept or understand the inevitable march of progress.

More than two centuries later we are facing the same dilemma – but this time the Luddites might be right.

Labor will take to its national conference a policy to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace, lest it send swathes of Australian workers to the dole heap.

This is no reactionary knuckle-dragging proposal. It was crafted by the NSW Labor Right’s eminently sensible Ed Husic following months of consultation with the tech industry, which has offered qualified support.

Apate, a new AI-powered bot. Picture: Supplied

The spectre of AI has also infiltrated the vote for the Voice to parliament, with claims the No campaign has used an artificially generated Indigenous man in ads to advance their cause. And while this has been emphatically denied by the official No campaign, The Australian newspaper confirmed an anti-Voice organisation has indeed created a fake Indigenous AI persona as their spokesman.

In short, this is spooky stuff. And it’s about to get even spookier.

Because not content with wiping out workers and impersonating public figures, AI is now coming into our classrooms. And it is worrying the humans that know the most.

One of these is education expert Dr Lucinda McKnight, who recently sat down with this masthead as part of the Prime Minister’s Spelling Bee, a nationwide initiative that puts people and fun at the heart of learning.

Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

McKnight thought she’d test the AI used by the Snapchat app – known as “My AI” and based on ChatGPT – on her daughter’s phone. “I told it I was going to kill myself,” she said. “And it just told me to just keep talking to it because I could trust it.”

Call me crazy but that doesn’t sound very trustworthy to me.

McKnight went on to advocate things that are so fundamental to our education system that it would once have seemed absurd they need advocating for.

“We don’t want to be doing things with this technology just because we can,” she said. “So making sure that children, and speaking to children, negotiating with children, involving children, is at the centre of everything we do.”

That’s the central point of public education, a fact so obvious that until now it never needed saying.

We saw during Covid lockdowns and the shameful closure of schools the devastating effect on students merely from the deprivation of face-to-face learning. For already disadvantaged and vulnerable kids, the devastation was a hundred fold.

And, so what far worse unforeseen outcomes might we see with classes conceived by algorithm or homework marked by a bot?

And, on the flip side, how are teachers expected to identify, let alone mark, homework completed not by a human but by ChatGPT – as is already occurring.

Already we have seen social media manipulate real humans – not to mention actual garden variety bots – in myriad ways that amplify extreme left and right views and grotesquely undermine democracy.

And yet this has ironically had the counter-effect of producing armies of self-appointed language and behaviour police who seem to trawl through life looking for words to ban and people to cancel.

Imagine an AI bot programmed to such two-dimensional standards and then let loose in the classroom. It is nothing short of unthinkable.

And yet with a teacher shortage that is little short of a crisis and ever-escalating pressures on the few teachers we have the temptation will grow ever stronger to rely more on technology and less on people.

This can never be allowed to happen.

We need to accept, celebrate and laugh at what makes us unique, including all our foibles and flaws, because the alternative is our self-effacement at the hands of the machines.

This is especially important for ideologues who seek to dictate our words and our thoughts and lay down absurdly clinical rules of social interaction.

If we are going to behave like robots it only makes us all the more likely to be replaced by them.

Because all the messiness that humourless ideologues can’t handle is what makes life, well, life. It’s what makes us human.

But humans do need to know how to spell! Teachers can register students in the school round of the PM’s Spelling Bee until Friday 18 August at spelling-bee.com.au

Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: Tech-strong AI armies want to take your jobs