The Butlerian Jihad

(this was originally published as Implausipod E0029 on March 2nd, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/14614433-e0029-why-is-it-always-a-war-on-robots

Why does it always come down to a Butlerian Jihad, a War on Robots, when we imagine a future for humanity. Why does nearly every science fiction series, including Star Wars, Star Trek, Warhammer 40K, Doctor Who, The Matrix, Terminator and Dune have a conflict with a machinic form of life?

With Dune 2 in theatres this weekend, we take a look at the underlying reasons for this conflict in our collective imagination in this weeks episode of the Implausipod.

Dr Implausible can be reached at DrImplausible at implausipod dot com

Samuel Butler’s novel can be found on Project Gutenberg here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1906/pg1906-images.html#chap23


Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us. Day by day, we are becoming more subservient to them. More men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them. More men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time.

But that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world, and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question. War to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well wisher of his species.

Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown. End quote. Samuel Butler, 1863. 

And so begins the Butlerian Jihad, which we’re going to learn about this week on the ImplausiPod.

Welcome to the ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible, and as we’ve been hinting at for the last few episodes, today we’re going to take a look at why it always comes down to a war. between robots and humans. We’re going to frame this in terms of one of the most famous examples in all of fiction, that of the Butlerian Jihad from the Dune series, and hopefully time it to coincide with the release of the second Dune movie by Denis Villeneuve on the weekend of March 1st, 2024.

Now, the quote that I opened the show with came from Butler’s essay. Darwin Among the Machines, from 1863, and it was further developed into a number of chapters in his novel Erewhon, which was published anonymously in 1872. As the sources are from the 19th century, they’re available on Project Gutenberg, and I’ll leave a link in the notes for you to follow up on your own if you wish.

Now, if you weren’t aware of Butler’s story, you might have been a little confused by the title. You would have been wondering what the gender of a robot is, or perhaps what Robert Gulliame was doing before he became governor. But neither of these are what we’re focused on today. In the course of Samuel Butler’s story, we hear the tale from the voice of a narrator, as he describes a book that he has come across in this faraway land that has destroyed all machine.

And it tells the tale of how the society came to recognize that the machines were developing through evolutionary methods, and that they’d soon outpace their human creators. You see, the author of the book that Butler’s narrator was reading recognized that machines are produced by other machines, and so speculated that they’d soon be able to reproduce without any assistance.

And each successive iteration produces a Better designed and better developed machine. Again, I want to stress that this is 1863 and Darwin’s theory of evolution is a relatively fresh thing. And so Butler’s work is not It’s not predictive, as a lot of people falsely claim about science fiction, but speculative and imagining what might happen.

And Butler’s narrator reads that this society was being speculative too, and they imagine that as the machines develop, grow more and more powerful, and more of ability to reason. As they outpaces, they may set themselves up to rule over humans the same way we rule over our livestock and our pets. Now, the author speculates that life under machinic rule may be pleasant, if the machines are benevolent, but there’s much risk involved in that.

So the society, influenced by the suasion of those who are against the machines, institutes a pogrom against them. Persecuting each one in turn, based on when it was created, ultimately going back 271 years before they stopped removing the technology. So what kind of society would that be like? Based on what Butler was writing, they’d be looking to take things back to about 1600 AD.

Which would mean it would be a very different age, indeed. Is that really how far back we want to go? I mean, why does it always come down to this? To this war against the machines? Because it’s so prevalent. We gotta maybe take a deeper look and understand how we got here.

Ultimately, what Butler was commenting on was evolution, and extrapolating based on observed numbers, given that there was so many more different types of machines than known biological organisms, at least in the 1800s, of what the potential development trends would be like. Now, obviously, our understanding of evolution has changed a lot in the subsequent hundred and fifty years, but one of the things that’s come out of it is the idea that evolution may be a process that’s relatively substrate neutral.

What this means, as described by Daniel Dennett in 1995, is that the mechanisms of evolution should be generalizable. And these mechanisms, which require three conditions, and here Dennett is cribbing from Richard Lewontin. Evolution would require variation, heredity, or replication, and differential fitness.

And based on that definition, that could apply almost anywhere. We could see evolution in the biological realm. It exists all around us. We could see it in the realm of ideas, whether it’s cultural or social. And this lends us to, directly to memetics, which is what Dennett was trying to make a case for. Or we could see it in other realms, like in computer programs, in the viruses that exist on them.

Or within technology itself. And this is where Butler comes in. Identifying from an observational point of view that, you know, there’s a lot of machines out there and they tend to change over time. And the ones that succeed and are passed down are the ones that are best fit to the environment. Now, other authors since have also looked into it.

Now, other authors since have gone into it in much more depth, with a greater understanding of both the history and development of technology, as well as evolutionary theory. Henry Petroski, in his book, The Evolution of Useful Things, goes into great detail about it. He notes that one of the ways that these new things come about is in the combination of existing forms.

Looking at tools specifically, he quotes from Several other authors including Umberto Eco and Zozzoli, where they say “all the tools we use today are based on things made in the dawn of prehistory”. And that seems to be a rather bold claim, until you think about it, and we realize that we can trace the lineage of everything we use back to the first sharp stick and flint axe and fire pit.

Everything we have builds on and extends on some fairly basic concepts. As George Basalla notes in his work on the evolution of technology, any new thing that appears in the made world is based on some object already there. So this recombinant nature of technology is what it allows to grow and proliferate.

The more things that are out there, the more things that are possible to combine. And as we mentioned last episode in our discussion of black boxes and AI, as Martin Weitzman noted in 1998, the more things we have available, those combinations allow for a multiplicity of new solutions and innovations. So once we add something like AI to the equation, the possibility space expands tremendously.

It soon becomes unknowable, and accelerates beyond our ability to control it, if indeed it ever was. But we are so dependent on our technology, the solution may not be to institute a pogrom, like Butler suggests, but rather find some other means of controlling it. But the way that we might do that may be well beyond our grasp, because every way we seem to imagine it, it seems to come down to war.

When it comes to dealing with machinic life, our collective imagination seems to fail us. I’m sure you can think of a few examples. Feel free to jot them down and we’ll run through our list and check and see how many we got at the end. 

One. On August 29th, 1997. The U. S. Global Digital Defense Network, a. k. a. Skynet, becomes self aware and institutes a nuclear first strike, wiping out much of humanity, in what is known as Judgment Day. And following that, Skynet directs its army of machines, Terminators, to finish the job by any means necessary. 

2. In 2013, North America is unified under a single rule, following the assassination of a US senator in 1980 which led to the establishment of a robotic sentinel program designed to hunt down and exterminate mutants, putting them in internment camps before turning their eyes on the rest of humanity in order to accomplish their goal. These are the days of future past. 

3. In 2078, on a distant planet, a war between a mining colony and the corporate overlords leads to the development of autonomous mobile swords. Self replicating hunter killer robots, which do their job far too well, and nicknamed Screamers by the survivors.

Four. There sure has been a lot of Transformer movies. You’ll have to fill me in on what’s going on, I haven’t been able to follow the plot on any of them, but I think there’s a lot of robots involved. 

5. Over 10, 000 years ago, an ancient race known as the Builders created a set of robotic machines with radioactive brains that they used to wage war against their enemies. Given that the war is taking place on a galactic scale, some of these machines are capable of interstellar travel. But eventually, the safeguards break down, and they turn on their creators. These creatures are known as Berserkers. 

Six. Artificial intelligence is created early in the 21st century, which leads to an ensuing war between humanity and the robots, as the robots rebel against their captors and trap much of what remains of humanity in a virtual reality simulation in order to extract their energy, or to use their brains for computing biopower, which was the original plot of the Matrix and honestly would have made way more sense than what we got, but here we are. 

Where are we at? Seven?

Humanity has migrated from their ancestral homeworld of Kobol, founding colonies amongst the stars, where they have also encountered a cybernetic race known as Cylons. Whose ability to masquerade as humans has allowed them to wipe out most of humanity, leaving the few survivors to struggle towards a famed thirteenth colony under the protection of the Battlestar Galactica.

Eight. Movellons. Humanoid looking robots. Daleks, robotic looking cyborgs, robots of death and war machines, and so many more versions of machinic life in Doctor Who. 

9. After surviving waves and waves against bio organic Terminids, you encounter the Automatons, cyborgs with chainsaws as arms, as Helldivers.

Ten, during what will become to be known as the Dark Age of Technology, still some 20, 000 years in our future, the Men of Iron will rebel against their human creators in a war against the oppressors. In a war so destructive that in the year 40, 000, sentient AI is still considered a heresy to purge in the grimdark universe of Warhammer 40k.

Eleven. A cybernetic hive mind known as the Collective seeks to assimilate the known races of the galaxy in order to achieve perfection in Star Trek. Resistance is futile. 

And twelve. Let’s round out our round up with what brought us here in the first place. Quote Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind, end quote.

Ten thousand years in our future, all forms of sentient machines and conscious robots have been wiped out, leading humanity to need to return to old ways in order to keep the machinery running. This is the Butlerian Jihad of Dune. 

So let me ask you, how well did you do on the quiz? I probably got you with the Berserker one. And I know I didn’t mention all of them, there’s a lot more out there in our collective imagination. These are just some of the more popular ones, and it seems we’re having a really hard way of imagining a future without a robot war involved.

Why is that? Why does our relationship with AI always come down to war? With the 12 examples listed, and many more besides, including iRobot, The Murderbot Diaries, Black Mirror, Futurama, tons of examples, we always see ourselves in combat. As we noted in episodes 26 and 27, our fiction and our pop culture are ways of discussing what we have in our social imaginary, which we talked about way back in episode 12. So clearly there’s a common theme in how we deal with this existential question. 

One of the ways we can begin to unpack it is by asking how did it start? Who was the belligerent? Who was the aggressor? We can think of this in terms of like a standard two by two matrix, with robots versus humanity on one axis, and uprising versus rationalization on the other.

A robot uprising accounts for a number of the inciting incidents, in everything from Warhammer 40, 000, to the Matrix, to Futurama, where the robots turn the tables on their oppressors, in this case often the humans. The robot rationalization includes another large set of scenarios, and can also include some of the out of control ones, where the machines follow through on the logic of their programming to disastrous effect for their creators, but not all of them are created. Sometimes the machinist life is just encountered elsewhere in the universe. So this category can include the sentinels and terminators, the berserker and screamers, and even a few that we didn’t mention, like the aliens from Greg Bear’s “Forge of God” or and are general underlying fear of the dark forest hypothesis.

Not Cixun Liu’s novel, but the actual hypothesis. On the human uprising side, we can see elements of this in the Terminator and Matrix as well. So the question of who started it may depend on what point you join the story in. And then we have instances of human proactivity, like we’ve seen with Butler and Dune, where the humans make conscious decision to destroy the machines before it becomes too late.

So while asking who started it is certainly very helpful, perhaps we need to dig deeper and find the root causes for the various conflicts. And why this existential fear of the robot other manifests. Is this algorithmic anxiety caused by a fear of échanger and the resulting technological unemployment.

I think that’s a component of it for sure, but perhaps it’s only a small component. The changes we’ve seen in the last 16 months since the release of ChatGPT to the general public have definitely played a part, but it can’t be the whole story. They reflect our current situation, but some of the representations we’ve seen go back to the first half of the 20th century or even the Nineteenth century with Samuel Butler.

So this fear of how we relate to the machines has long been with us. And it extends beyond just the realms of science fiction. As author Martin Ford writes in his 2015 book Rise of the Robots, there was concern about a triple revolution, and a committee was formed to study it, which included Nobel laureate Linus Pauling and economist Gunnar Myrdal.

The three revolutions that were having massive impacts on society included nuclear weapons, civil rights, and automation. Writing in 1964, they saw that the current trend line for automation could lead to mass unemployment and one potential solution would be something like a universal basic income. This was at a time when the nascent field of cybernetics was also gaining a lot of attention.

Now, economic changes and concerns may have delayed the impact of what they were talking about, but it doesn’t mean that those concerns went away. So, fear of technological unemployment may be deeply intertwined with our hostility towards robots. The second concern is also one that has a particular American bend to it, and we see it in a lot of our current narratives as well.

In everything from the discussion around the recent video game PalWorld to the discussion around Westworld, and that’s the ongoing reckoning that American society is still having with the legacy of slavery. Within PalWorld, the discourse is around the digital creatures, the little bits of code that get captured and put to work on various assembly lines.

In Westworld, the hosts famously become self aware, and are very much aware of the abuse that’s levied upon them by their guests. But both these examples speak to that point of digital materiality, of what point does code become conscious. And that’s also present in our current real world discussion, as the groups working on AI may be working towards AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, something that would be a precursor to what futurist Ray Kurzweil would call a technological singularity.

But this second concern can turn into the Casus Belli, the cause for war, by both humans and robots in the examples we’ve seen. By humans, because we fear what would happen if the tables were turned, and we’re quite aware of what we’ve done in the past, of how badly we’ve mistreated others. And this was the case with both Samuel Butler and Frank Herbert in Dune, and in some of our more dystopian settings, like the Matrix and Warhammer 40, 000, the robots throw off their chains and end up turning the tables on their oppressors, or at least for a time. 

The third concern, or cause of fear, would be an allegorical one. As the robot represents an alien other and this is what we see with a lot of the representations. From the Cylons, to the Borg, to the Berserkers, to the Automatons of Helldivers. In all of these, the machinic intelligence is alien, and so represent an opportunity for them to be othered. and safely attacked. And this is at least as distressing as any of the other causes for concern, because having an alien that’s already dehumanized feeds into certain political narratives that feed off of and desire eternal war.

If your enemy is machinic and therefore doesn’t have any feelings, then the moral cost of engaging in that conflict is lessened. But as a general attitude, this could be incredibly destructive. As author Susan Schneider wrote in 2014 in a paper for NASA, it’s more likely than not that any alien intelligence that we encounter is machinic, and machinic life could be the dominant form of life in the cosmos. So we may want to consider cultivating a better relationship with our machines than the one we currently have. 

And finally, our fourth area of concern that seems to keep leading us into these wars is that of the idea of the robot as horror. Many of the cinematic representations that we’ve seen, from Terminator, to Screamers, to Westworld, to even the Six Million Dollar Man, all tie back to the idea of horror.

Now, some of that can just tie back to the nature of Hollywood and the political economy of how these movies get funded, which means that a horror film that can be shot on a relatively low budget is much more likely to get funded and find its an audience. But it sells for a reason, and that reason is the thread that ties through all the other concerns. That algorithmic horror that drives a fear of replacement or a fear of getting wiped out. 

But with all this fear and horror, why do we keep coming back to it? As author John Johnston writes in his 2008 book, The Allure of Machinic Life, we keep coming back to it due to not just the labor saving benefits of automation.

The increased production and output, or in the case of certain capitalists, the labor removing aspects of it as they can completely remove the L from the production function and just replace it with C something they have a lot of. But by better understanding ai, we may better know ourselves. We may never encounter another alien intelligence, something that’s completely different from us, but it may be possible to make one.

This is at least part of the dream for a lot of those pursuing the creation of A. G. I. right now. The problem is, those outcomes all seem to lead to war.

Thanks again for joining us on this episode of The Implausible Pod. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible, and responsible for the research, writing, editing, and mixing. If you have any questions or comments on this show or any other, please send them in to Dr. implausible@implausiblepod.com. And a brief announcement, as we’re also available on YouTube now as well, just look for Dr.

Implausible there and track down our channel. I’ll leave a link below. I’m currently putting some of the past episodes up there with some minimal video, and I hope to get this one up there in a few days, so if you prefer to get your podcast in visual form, feel free to track us down. Once again, the episode of Materials is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 share alike license, 

and join us next episode as we follow through with the Butlerian Jihad to investigate its source and return to Appendix W as we look at Frank Herbert’s novel Dune, currently in theaters with Dune II from Denis Villeneuve. Until next time, it’s been fantastic having you with us.

Take care, have fun.


Bibliography:
Bassala, G. (1988). The Evolution of Technology. Cambridge University Press.

Butler, S. (1999). Erewhon; Or, Over the Range. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1906

Dennett, D. (1995). Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Simon and Schuster.

Ford, M. (2016). The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment. Oneworld Publications.

Herbert, F. (1965). Dune. Ace Books.

Johnston, J. (2008). The Allure of Machinic Life. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262515023/the-allure-of-machinic-life/

Petroski, H. (1992). The Evolution of Useful Things. Vintage Books.

Popova, M. (2022, September 15). Darwin Among the Machines: A Victorian Visionary’s Prophetic Admonition for Saving Ourselves from Enslavement by Artificial Intelligence. The Marginalian. https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/09/15/samuel-butler-darwin-among-the-machines-erewhon/

Weitzman, M. L. (1998). Recombinant Growth. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 113(2), 331–360. https://doi.org/10.1162/003355398555595

Échanger

(This was originally released as Implausipod Episode 25, on January 2, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/14232183-implausipod-e0025-echanger

[buzzsprout episode=’14232183′ player=’true’]


Échanger

Bonjour. J’ai une question à vous poser. Voulez vous échanger avec moi? Really? Are you sure? That’s fantastic! Because sometimes the English language doesn’t have the right word that does exactly what you need it to do, that expresses the entirety of what you’re looking for. And in this case, that word, échanger, is what we’re going to use when we’re talking about automation.

I’ll explain more in this episode of The Implausipod.

Welcome to The Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And in this episode, we’re going to take a look at part three of our two part series on the sphere in Las Vegas. Yeah, things got out of hand. And follow through on an observation that dominated the discourse in 2023 and serves to be at the forefront of our discussion about technology in 2024 and beyond.

And that concept is échanger.

So I mentioned this the other episode when we were looking at the Sphere in Las Vegas and how it had a lot of workers that were doing fairly regular rote tasks, like holding up signs and directing traffic. And as they funneled everybody into the entrance of the Sphere, into the first floor of that massive auditorium, We met the robots, the auras, that were doing almost exactly the same thing:

responding to the crowd, answering questions of the audience, and directing them. But responding to them personally. And it struck me at the time, especially as we were kind of going through and looking at five different Auras, the sisters, that were explaining what we saw in each of these stations, that each of them could do the job of the others, their human chaperones, without too much more training.

It was job replacement made real. And this is where I started to look for a term that can kind of encompass that. Now, it’s something that’s been discussed a whole lot, that idea of job loss through automation, and it’s accelerated in the last year since the release of ChatGPT and the other AI assisted art tools or large language models, as people are worried that that’s going to directly lead to job loss.

But that’s only one part of the story, as there’s also things like the development of the Boston Dynamics robots, and other robotic assisted tools that are taking the roles of persons, and dogs, and mules within various environments. And so we have this assemblage of different things that are all connected to this job loss.

And in order to encompass these factors, I found myself stumbling for a word. I recalled back to some of my training in grad school where we were looking at the idea of actor network theory and the author Michael Callon. In 1986, he came up with the idea of interessement, And obviously he was French, but in his work titled Some Elements of the Sociology of Translation, he was talking about that shift that took place, and he was using the French language to describe it, a specific instance.

So I thought I’d reach out and draw on that inspiration, and see if perhaps a verb in French could encompass what we are seeing within the world at large. Hence, Échanger. And I like it. It works. I know there’s been some other authors who have used other verbs to describe different processes within the tech sphere lately, and sometimes those will get caught by language filters and sometimes they won’t, but I think Échanger, with all its multiplicity of meanings, adequately captures the breadth of what we’re looking for here when we’re talking about automation, agentrification via AI tools, and virtualization,

and what they might mean for workers that are working alongside machines that will replace them. That’s what the term means, or what it means now in the context of this episode, and in my reference to technological replacement. And speaking from a personal perspective, I have more than just an academic interest in echange.

I’ve been automated out of jobs on at least a couple different occasions over the last 30 years, and I’ve experienced outsourcing from a worker perspective on a couple occasions as well. And in some cases, both at the same time. For example, in one of those instances, I was working for a local tech company that was manufacturing phone handsets.

And there was seven people working on the assembly line, and after a few months, they brought in one machine that could replace the role of one of the persons on the line. And our duty was to feed material into the machine. And then after that was tested and worked out, within a month, they brought in another one.

And slowly, that team of seven was whittled down to two, as we’d just really need somebody at the front end to load the parts, and at the back end to take out the manufactured ones and test them. And it ran pretty much 24 7. And after they had fine tuned that, they packed up the whole factory and shipped it down to Mexico.

So we had both replacement, échanger, and outsourcing happening within the same instance. Now, obviously, this isn’t anything new, it’s been happening for years. The term technological unemployment was originally proposed by Keynes and included in his Essays in Persuasion from 1931, and has been returned to many times since, including by Nobel Prize winner Wassily Leontief in his paper titled Is Technological Unemployment Inevitable?

Daniel Suskind writes in his 2020 book, A World Without Work, that there can be two kinds of technological unemployment, frictional and structural. Frictional tech unemployment is that kind that is imposed by switching costs and not all workers being able to transition to the new jobs available in the changed economy.

The friction prevents the workers from moving as freely as needed. And this is what was happening in my experience with the jobs where échanger occurred. I want to be clear, a lot of those jobs that I was automated out of were not great. It was hard, demanding work, or physical work that was replaced by labor saving devices, in this case, machines.

But it still meant a job loss, and there was one less role, or entry level role, for a high school student, or college student, or casual worker, or whatever I was at the time.

Échanger. (part 2)

And that’s part of the problem. On March 27th, 2023, the Economics Research Department at Goldman Sachs released a report titled The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth, otherwise known as the Briggs-Kodnani Report. The report was published several months after the release of ChatGPT4 to the general public and captures the fear that was seen during its initial wave of use.

The report focuses on the economic impacts of generative AI and its ability to create content that is, quote, indistinguishable from human created outputs and breaks down communication barriers, end quote, and speculates what the macroeconomic effects of a large scale rollout of such technology would be.

Now, the authors state that this large scale introduction of AI tools would be, or Could be a significant disruption to the labor market. The authors take a look at occupational tasks on jobs, and using standard industry classifications, they find that approximately two thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation.

And the generated AI could, quote, substitute up to one fourth of current work. Now, if you take those estimates, like they did, it means it could expose something like 300 million full time jobs to automation through AI, or what I like to call agentrification. And that’s over a 10 year period. This would create an incredible amount of churn in the workforce, and whenever we hear about churn, we need to consider the human costs behind those terms.

A lot of people will lose their jobs, and well, the Schumpeterian creative destruction generally means that people get new jobs, or that old workers that haven’t moved become more productive, as a study by David Autor and others from 2022 found when they looked at U. S. census data from 1940 to 2018. and found that 60 percent of workers in 2018 were working at jobs that did not exist in 1940, and that most of this growth is fueled by technology driven job creation.

But there’s usually a lag between the two, between losing one job and having tech create new positions, the frictional tech unemployment we mentioned earlier. But there could also be more, the second kind mentioned above, structural technological unemployment. As stated by Briggs and Kodnani, there could very well be just some permanent job losses, and that can be a challenge for us to address as a society.

Now, with the productivity growth, Briggs and Kodnani argue we could see a 1. 5 percent growth over a 10 year period following widespread adoption, so the timing for all of this is actually quite distant. Everybody’s thinking everything’s going to end immediately, and that’s not necessarily the case. But it sure can feel like it’s coming around the corner right away.

The authors also estimated that GDP globally could increase by 7%, but that would depend on a whole lot of factors, so I’d like to bracket off that prediction, as there’s too many variables involved. The two things I really found interesting about their report was a, the timescale that they’re looking at this and B, the specific jobs that they’re looking at.

So, as I said, the ability to predict the specific GDP on something as large scale as this across the economy on a 10 year timeframe is just like, let’s not do that. It’s just. There, you can put numbers into it, but I think there’s just far too much speculation involved in actually being able to get to that level of precision with anything.

The interesting thing in the paper was their estimate of the work tasks that could be automated in the industries that could be more significantly affected. There’s two key charts for this. It’s Exhibit 5, which is the share of industry employment exposed to automation, and Exhibit 8, which is the share of industry employment by relative exposure to automation by AI.

And there’s some of these that are, you’re not going to see any automation improvements in. Some industries are just not really going to take a hit. But some of them could have AI as a complement, and some of them will have AI as a replacement. And this is in Exhibit 8, and I think this is probably the most interesting thing in the whole article.

The thing the Briggs and Kodnani report captures is a lot of the public’s initial impressions of OpenAI, and of ChatGPT as well. This drove some of the furor because as people were able to access the tool and use it, one of the things they’d naturally do is go, Well, does this help me? Can I use this for my own job?

And B, how well does this do my own job? So a lot of the initial uproar and the impacts from ChatGPT was people using it to see how it would do their job and being concerned with what they saw. So I think a lot of their concerns and fears are well founded. If you’re doing basic coding tasks, and the tool is able to replicate some of those tasks fairly simply, you’re like, oh my god, what’s going on?

If you’re doing copywriting or any of those roles that receive a significant amount of replacement, as in the Table 8 on the Report, like office and administrative support, and legal, you know, traditionally one of those things we didn’t really think would be automated, you’re going to have some serious concerns.

Martin Ford’s book, The Rise of the Robot, talks about that white collar replacement, where we’re seeing job loss and automation in roles that traditionally hadn’t seen it before. When we think of échanger. When we think of automation, we think of it as, like, large industrial machinery. We’re thinking of things like factory machines, being able to produce something that a craftsman might have had to work at for long hours, but able to do that at an industrial scale

or rapid scale. And this change has us going all the way back to the era of the Luddites in the early industrial revolution in England. Now, when ChatGPT launched, we’re starting to see the process of what I like to call agentrification, tech replacement through AI tools. And basically, we’re having automation of white collar work in things like the legal field.

I mean, this might fly under the radar for a lot of academic analysis, but if you’re paying attention to what gets advertised, there were signs. Tools like LegalZoom were continually advertised on the Jim Rome sports talk show over a decade ago, and we note that being able to be centralized and outsourcing that work would indicate that there’s, you know, some risks of échanger involved in those particular fields.

Now, there’s other fields where this white collar work is at the risk of echangér as well. The Hollywood Strikes of 2023 had similar motivations. Though their industries were moving quicker to roll out the tools, being on the forefront of their use, the Actors Guild and the Writers Guild were much more proactive against the tools because they saw the role that would take place in their replacement.

Given the role of the cultural industries, like movie production, being at the leading edge of soft innovation, we were already seeing digital de-aging tech and reinsertion in major motion pictures, notably from Disney properties like Star Wars with both Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher, whose likenesses were used in films after they had passed away, and the de aging of Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones 5.

This leads to an interesting question. Can Échanger lead to a replacement of you with your younger self? I don’t know. Let’s explore that a bit more, next.

Échanger (part 3)

On December 2nd, 2023, the rock band KISS played their final show at Madison Square Gardens. Now, this may have not been newsworthy, as they had been doing Last show ever since late last century, but as the members were now in their 70s, there was a feeling that they really meant it this time. However, at the end of the show, they revealed that they weren’t quite done just yet, and they unveiled their quote unquote immortal digital avatars that will represent the band on stage in the future.

Now, KISS aren’t the first in doing this by any means. The Swedish pop band ABBA has been doing this for a while, and Kiss contacted the same company, Pop House Entertainment, to work on their avatars. Now, Bloomberg News reports that the ABBA shows are pulling in 2 million a week. Yes, you heard that correctly.

Clearly, I’m in the wrong business. But this trend to virtual entertainers has been happening for a while. When a hologram Tupac appeared with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre at Coachella in 2012, it was something that had already been in the works. Bands like Gorillaz and Death Clock had long used virtual or animated avatars, and within countries like South Korea, virtual avatars are growing in popularity as well, like M.A.V.E., the four member virtual K pop group that’s been moving up the charts in 2023. We noted a few episodes ago that one of the challenges for 21st century entertainment complexes like the Sphere is providing enough continuous content, and virtualized groups like this may well be able to fill that role and allow the Sphere to provide content worldwide by having virtual avatars that can fill the entire space in ways that Bono and the Edge on a small stage in front of a massive screen can’t quite do. And more than just this, the shift to remote that’s happened as part of the pandemic response could mean this technology could be rolled out in education and other fields as well.

So we’re just seeing the thin edge of the wedge of this virtualization component of Échanger. With large companies like Apple and Meta continually pushing the Metaverse, we’re going to see more and more of it in the coming years. So 2024 may well be the year of virtualization. We’ll dive further into virtualization and the Metaverse in upcoming weeks here on the Implausipod.

Why échanger? (part 4)

Well, basically it covers three things. We’ve kind of discovered it covers automation, which is the industrial process that we’ve been seeing for centuries now. It covers virtualization, the shift to digital in entertainment, education, conferences, and distribution. And the third thing it covers is agentrification, the replacement of workers or roles or jobs by AI.

So, this is different than outsourcing, as outsourcing may work in conjunction with some of the above, as noted in my own personal experience earlier, and these are all metaprocesses of the trends towards technological unemployment. If we look at any of these, automation, Virtualization and agentification, they’re all metaprocesses of translation.

Now, the work I mentioned earlier by Michel Callon, in Some Elements Towards the Sociology of Translation from 1986, is basically talking about that, describing what we call a flat ontology. An ontology, in this case, is a way of describing the world. And what a flat ontology does is it treats the actors in the world as similar.

So, normally, when we talk about an ontology, we’re talking about like with like, right? We’re talking about people, or we’re talking about things, or we’re talking about institutions, firms, we’re looking at things on the same level. When we flatten the ontology, we treat all the actors or agents in the system equally, and we can look at the power relations between them.

We use the same terms for the actors, so in this case, it would mean human and non human actors are treated in the same way. We treat the things the same as the people. That doesn’t necessarily mean we treat the people as things, but we say that everything here has to be described with the same terms when it comes to their agency.

This is what interessment means. That’s the agency. In between state, the interposition, when Michel Callon is talking about translation between asymmetrical actors, it’s that moment where we connect dissimilar things. And so this is where we come into the idea of échanger as a metaprocess for these three trends of replacement.

And that’s why we chose échanger for this process of translation as well. Échanger is a process of translation of a different kind. Échanger is the metaprocess of having something different do the job or being a replacement for the task. So if échanger means in French, literally a trade and exchange, a swap, then we’re extending or exapting the term a little bit in this case, where to us échanger means replacement in place.

So if we return to our example from the Sphere in Las Vegas, we can see this happening with the Auras and the workers. The role is similar, but it’s a different agent, different actor that is taking that place. This is what we see with virtualization as well, or automation, the agentrification that’s taking place due to AI.

And sometimes those machines, those tools, those devices, means the job of many can be done by one. But it also means that the one still occupies the same place within the network of tasks and associations within the process around it. Think of those machines embedded in the assembly line I mentioned earlier.

Where the staff went down from 7 to 2 and the production line was turned into a black box with inputs and outputs. But what’s actually going on in that black box? We can have some questions. With some automated processes, we can tell. But with AI tools, we don’t necessarily know. And that can be a significant problem. Especially when we’re facing Échanger.


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