When AI called my friend a murderer, it solved my daughter’s career choice.
It’s a little late, guys!
My wife is a lecturer at the university. As things disappear around him, the AI makes his and the rest of his colleagues’ lives hell as he tries to figure out what his students know and what cheating technology can help them pretend to know it.
In The Social Dilemma, even Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, expressed regret.Credit: netflix
My HSC daughter is trying to choose a career where Open AI CEO Sam Altman doesn’t think bots can do better than her. Stressful because he is creative and wants to do this type of work Altman claims there’s no ‘real job’. I suggested he become an internet lawyer. Something tells me we’re going to need them a lot.
I pray that digital journalism will be a “real job” long enough to pay off the massive mortgage that keeps me awake at night. It’s a rewarding career that we fact-check before publishing, and if we accidentally say an innocent graphic designer is a child murderer, we’ll be held accountable.
My son wants to be a pilot; I was like that too, before I realized I enjoyed writing about flying more than doing it. I worry about him, not because of the dangers present, but because, to save money, some airlines consider only one pilot in the cockpit. Never mind that many modern aviation accidents are caused by technology that takes the pilot out of the equation. 2009 Air France disaster 228 people were living their last moments while pilots were frantically trying to figure out what their plane was doing. Man and machine were at odds with each other. Most of the time they are.
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The challenge for airline manufacturers should be to re-embrace the human beings they seek to make redundant, rather than single-pilot cockpits. And in many ways, this must be society’s problem, too.
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably thinking I’m a Luddite who needs to plow the fields with a horse. No, I’m tired of hearing everyone complain about the scourge of social media on mental health and the jobs that will be taken over by machines while thinking there’s nothing we can do about it.
Why do we tolerate the path to a harmful future being paved by people who don’t need to walk it? Why don’t we use AI to solve old problems instead of creating new ones? Every night, on my way home from work, I sit helplessly at the red traffic light on the main road, while no car passes at the green light on the secondary road. That’s something AI can definitely set its sights on.
The only person I’ve ever heard speak highly of AI is my son, who used ChatGPT to create a persuasive text trying to convince his dad to buy him an e-bike. Without shame, he even sent me the commands he used; single entry.
I didn’t need the AI to help me formulate my answer, which it wouldn’t get until it convinced me itself.
Chris Harrison is content director Sydney Morning Herald.
