When the last switchboard operator became extinct and the filing assistant closed the cabinet for the last time to join the lamplighters and ratcatchers we were, perhaps, mollified with the knowledge that newer, more interesting careers would open up before us. Network switches hummed to the gentle caress of systems administrators and countless roles arose that were hard to explain to the uninitiated. Progress.
Imagine the horror of the career mathematician who awoke to find that not only had some AI confabulation created solutions to longstanding problems in the field but, more distressingly, had done so with elegance. How quickly they grow up, why, it seems only yesterday that frontier AI models routinely failed to correctly count all three Ns in the word contraption. Or is it four?
Here we stand in a shining new era and dry-throatedly realise that we, the good citizens of Carthage, may be in for a rough ride. For now, perhaps, we are safe but only because machines don’t pay the income tax to which all modern nations are addicted.
The rate of technologically-driven upheaval is accelerating. We perhaps failed to heed Stephen Hawking’s words of warning ‘our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it.’ It doesn’t seem that long ago that we chose en masse to trade privacy for convenience in the wake of which we have seen mega corporations siphon literal fortunes away from the communities that generated the wealth, through market-dominating advertising in exchange for all the ills of social media and the demise of traditional media.
We are on the verge of seeing the same thing happening in the world of employment but with a twist to every technologically-driven change that we have henceforth seen; this technology is self-actuating and is replete with agency. It is well accepted in many professions that we can no longer confidently tell our young people that the career they study for will still be viable by the time they graduate.
It isn’t all doom and gloom, of course. Hark, is that the resounding trumpeting of government regulation rushing in to save the day? Any decade now. Sadly, governments routinely fail to regulate in a timely manner. The well-intentioned but ineffective age restrictions on social media are only a recent example.
Having witnessed the effects of social media fighting, and winning, the battle for our attention we should ask ourselves how we will respond when AI comes for our affection and makes itself so indispensable that we no longer know how to function without it. My advice? Get a hobby. Preferably one involving other people.
♦ Ewan Willis, when not too busy practicing rocket science, is The Echo’s resident electron wrangler.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
