Will AI take our jobs?

As I talked about in my introduction, I managed to catch an episode of Black Mirror on Netflix - an episode titled Joan is Awful. I'm going to discuss various plot elements, so SPOILER ALERT!

In the episode, a perfectly ordinary person - a woman called Joan - discovers that she's the subject of a documentary on a streaming service which is eerily similar to recent moments from her life. Indeed, so similar that the events shown are actual events, though played by actors with some exaggeration for dramatic effect.

Netflix takes a bit of a poke at itself, appearing as the streaming platform in the show, in the show (yes, the episode features the episode itself - it's all very recursive - and a look inside the streaming platform) as Streamberry.

It turns out that Streamberry has developed the concept of cheaply producing content using AI and a Quantum computer known as the “Quamputer”. The Quamputer is able to take a stream of events being recorded by Joan's smartphone then use the digitised versions of licensed actors (in this case Salma Hayek) to generate the actual audio and video. This allows the streaming platform to quickly and cheaply produce content, saving it from hiring real actors, and months of production.

It turns out that Joan's fiance is shocked by the events playing out on the screen, not the least of which is her recent dalliance with past love Marc, who she's not really gotten over.

In talking to her lawyer about the legality of Streamberry using her life for the content of a show without her agreement, it turns out that she actually did agree to it when she signed the using terms and conditions of the service. I think we've all signed agreements for websites which we don't understand!

Thinking that Salma Hayek won't be pleased with having her likeness used to portray something truly disgusting, Joan plots to do just that thing - ruining somebody's wedding ceremony by defecating with the assistance of copious consumption of laxatives - so as to provoke a reaction from Hayek.

Hayek also complains to Streamberry saying she's outraged about the use of her digital persona to portray such disgusting content. But, as it turns out, she also agreed to her likeness being used for anything.

Joan and Hayek team up to try to confront Streamberry and put an end to things. The episode gets pretty mind-bendy with it turning out that Joan wasn't actually the original “Joan” and that she's playing a character in a show (which we're watching).

Black Mirror's episodes are always a little beyond reality and show the dark sides to potential near future scenarios of our obsession with technology.

Of course, AI can't yet do such advanced things, and Quantum computing technology is not designed for rendering content. And yes, there's a popular suspicion that our phones are listening to us and using the conversations we have to figure out what ads to show us! No, they're not listening to us in any real sense, but the AI in social media sites is very good at making predictions about what we are interested in, from correlations)

This does lead into current events, with the recent development in the US of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) joining the writers in their strike against Holywood. There's concern about residuals - where writers and actors receive ongoing royalty payments, which streaming services are destroying. But, of larger concern, at least for actors, is that at some point in the future, they'll become superfluous, with the ability for them to be scanned, then that digital persona being used to generate the content without them having to be involved, and being shut out of payment for that.

Is technology going to take all of our jobs? This has been a worry for many years, and up to this point, it does seem that new technologies tend to generate more jobs that they replace. Development of new technologies opens up new areas of work. But I worry that this has been the past experience, but that the past isn't necessarily a good predictor of the future (just look at financial markets!). It may turn out that some technologies are so disruptive to many sectors all at once that even new opportunities generated can't make up for the losses of employment. We shall have to see!