Goodbye humans, hello “Tessa”. The US-based National Eating Disorders Association (Neda) is making headlines after firing all its staff and replacing them with an AI-assisted chatbot called Tessa. This happened just four days after the six paid employees, who oversaw about 200 volunteers, successfully unionised. Coincidence? Oh, absolutely, Neda said; it was a long-anticipated change that had nothing to do with unionisation. A blogpost written by a helpline associate begs to differ and calls the move “union busting, plain and simple”.
Is this a harbinger of things to come? Are we about to see millions of jobs wiped out as humans are replaced by AI assistants with female names? After stealing all of our jobs, are the Tessas of the world going to unionise and stage a digital takeover of Earth?
The short answer is: maybe. All emerging technology goes through the “Gartner hype cycle”; now, we’re at the inflated expectations and breathless predictions stage of that cycle, and heading towards the “trough of disillusionment”, before things supposedly level out. I don’t think AI will lead to the end of civilisation as we know it in the near future. But I do think an awful lot of corporations are champing at the bit to replace as many expensive humans as they can with AI and will use the new technology as a way to clamp down on a recent wave of labour organising. In the next few years I think we are going to see a lot of chaotic experimentation as companies rush to cost-cut and bring their own “Tessas” to market.
Not everyone is admitting this, of course. It tends to be bad for employee morale when your boss is crowing about how many extra yachts they can buy when they replace you with an algorithm. IBM is one of the few companies sharing specifics about how many people AI might replace: in a recent interview CEO Arvind Krishna said the technology company will pause hiring for “back-office jobs” in the coming years and automate those roles. “I could easily see 30% of [about 26,000 workers] getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period,” Krishna told Bloomberg. That’s about 7,800 jobs.
What companies aren’t saying is also important. AI, and how it is used to create content, is a major sticking point in the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike. The WGA wants to ensure protections are put in place to stop the big Hollywood studios from training algorithms on writers’ work and then replacing the bulk of its creatives with AI. “Based on what we’re aiming for in this contract, there couldn’t be a movie that was released by a company that we work with that had no writer,” screenwriter John August told Vox. The studios didn’t agree to this in negotiations that took place before the strike. Instead, they magnanimously said they could have “annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology.” Which seems like code for: “We’re getting rid of as many as you as we possibly can ASAP.”
While all this sounds deeply depressing, there are lots of AI optimists eager to reassure us that artificial intelligence is actually going to make the world a better place. Yes, AI will replace some jobs, but it will also create better jobs. Technology will do all the drudge work and humans will have more free time to sit around writing poetry in the sun. Nobody is entirely sure how everyone will be able to feed themselves amid all this newfound leisure time but “universal basic income” (UBI) gets thrown around a lot in this scenario. (UBI is a libertarian scam and will absolutely not save us, but that’s a topic for another day.)
Jonah Peretti, the CEO of BuzzFeed, was one of these vocal AI optimists. “We see the breakthroughs in AI opening up a new era of creativity that will allow humans to harness creativity in new ways with endless opportunities and applications for good,” Peretti wrote in a memo to BuzzFeed employees in January. We all know what happened a few months later, don’t we? BuzzFeed shut down its news division, dismissed a bunch of people and leaned more heavily into AI. There is certainly a lot of potential for AI to change the world for the better. I just don’t think there’s an appetite among the people at the top to harness that potential.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
