Today I offer you a cautionary tale about new technology, specifically ChatGPT and all the other artificial intelligence tools amassing at the borders of your job security.
It’s reasonable to feel threatened. There are absolutely going to be hucksters and sociopaths pitching ways to replace the rank and file at every company with a subscription to some “A.I.-enabled” service claiming to do everything those poor, hapless humans used to do.
The most searing rendition of this was in Vonnegut’s “Player Piano,” about the demise of American society once machines start doing all the work. (It drags a bit in places, and doesn’t have the same raucous humor of his later novels, but he was spot-on with the threat to jobs.)
At the end of this, I’ll have some guidelines for you to help you adapt to the new reality and defend what’s left of your career. But first…
My Cautionary Tale
My first full-time job was as a sales engineer for a mainframe computer company. I presented the technology during sales, doing everything possible to convince the audience that our technology was the best. Our salesmen were always playing catch-up because we weren’t IBM. We had to prove our computer was better, cheaper, and easier to use.
We were never going to unseat IBM. Their mainframe fortress was unassailable.
But a couple of years later, a new technology called “client-server” became popular. It wasn’t a direct threat to mainframes, but some consultants convinced business executives that their biggest problem wasn’t which mainframe to use, but rather the cost of the people hired to program their mainframe.
Keep the machine, they said. But use our new-fangled, client-server technology to get data in and out of the mainframe and you’ll save tons of money with younger, cheaper programmers.
I Saw It With My Own Eyes
When Windows 3.0 launched in 1990, the Visual Basic programming language made computer programming look easy. So easy, in fact, that an Ivy League professor started a side-hustle to convince business executives that the computer revolution was at hand. The professor hosted seminars in which he had recent college graduates with liberal arts degrees demonstrate application development using the nascent client-server model.
Liberal arts graduates programming a computer? How is this possible? Back then, programming an IBM mainframe required specialized training and years of experience. A degree in rhetoric or, heaven-forbid, English, couldn’t possibly prepare you for the mathematically demanding field of computer science!!! (Obviously, they could learn it, but the professor leaned heavily into the technical prejudices of his audience.)
You Have to See it to Believe it
During a two-hour seminar, the professor blended academic anecdotes about innovation with the fun part of using Visual Basic to provide a plausible argument that old-fashioned software development was too expensive.
The professor basically granted the executives permission to pull the career rug right out from underneath all those COBOL programming nerds hurting the business’s bottom line with their middle-class salaries.
The beauty of the grift was that the professor charged the executives thousands of dollars for the privilege of being let in on this revolutionary approach.
The professor’s young, good-looking liberal-art-minions implemented simple examples of computer programs: data entry, database update and retrieval, displaying output. The presentation borrowed heavily from the Ronco infomercials (like for the Veg-o-Matic) with dramatic emphasis on ease of use and success.
“Anyone can do it,” was the message.
At the meet-and-greet reception following the seminar, they pitched consulting engagements for those ready to take the plunge.
If anyone can do it, why do we need consultants? Because true executives don’t roll up their sleeves and transform their business. They hire someone to do it. And if it doesn’t work out, they blame the consultants.
I’ll bet six bucks and my right nut that there’s a “professor” out there right now preparing to host seminars on how ChatGPT and its ilk will revolutionize everything in the office, and will teach executives how to leverage the technology to benefit their bottom line by removing all those expensive, middle-class salaries from payroll.
The Current Situation
You may feel threatened by these technologies but the real threat is the same as always: the managers, directors and vice presidents who only care about reducing costs to maximize profit.
For fifty years, there has been innovation threatening worker’s livelihoods. The threat started over 200 years ago, and it was the Luddites who first raised the alarm.
The Luddites were not against technology, but against the way business owners refused to guarantee anything resembling reliable employment to the commoners who ran the looms, mills, and other machinery at the first blush of the industrial revolution.
Here we are at the dawn of the artificial intelligence revolution, and it’s going to be the same. Bosses everywhere will look for leverage against employees. The sociopathic ones will be most aggressive. The less sociopathic bosses will follow their lead, shrugging as if to say, “That’s just how it goes nowadays.”
For more about how right the Luddites were about the assault on reliable employment, read this Smithsonian article.
Finally, here we are at the practical part of the article with advice on how to save your career from the coming revolution.
Ten easy ways to protect your career from ChatGPT
Train your dog to sniff-out A.I.-written articles on Medium and Substack
Band together with your coworkers to form a self-preservation team willing to lay down your lives for each other
Move your desk into an abandoned gypsum mine to avoid drone patrols hunting humans
Build a time machine and travel back to 1980
Convince a hot person you're from the future and have to stop the career apocalypse, then raise your love child to organize the A.I. resistance in the future
(While you’re there in 1980, put $20 on the Raiders to win the Super Bowl and invest the winnings in Microsoft stock, just in case the A.I. resistance doesn’t save your job in the future)
Find your past self and help them learn to write, draw, or make art of some kind, because the spark of creativity is what makes humans special
You probably should give away all the money you made on the stock market because extreme wealth turns you into a monster and you don't want to be part of the problem
Use creativity in your work, no matter what line of work you end up doing, to prove to the world you’re human
Fight like hell for your job
Thanks for Reading
As always, thanks for reading Look Busy. Take a moment to share with your friends.
Now get back to looking busy.
P.S. I used an A.I. tool to create the banner at the top.