A rumination on modern times and A.I.

I am not doing well in today’s world.  I go into a drugstore in Allentown today to buy some Vitamin B-12, and when I go to the check out, it appears that all the customers are checking and bagging their own items, paying by credit card.  I finally locate a cash register with a real live checker who takes cash.

Then I stop in at Menchies (I think that is the name–it is a soft ice cream establishment).  I have been there enough times that I got a discount by giving my phone number.  That no longer works.  You need an App on your cell phone.  But I don’t have a cell phone.  When I got out my wallet, the young clerk seemed to sneer–“Oh, you are paying cash?”

I recommend an article entitled “A.I. Is Too Good at Teaching Us to Do Things” by Carl Benedikt Frey, an economist at the University of Oxford.  Dr. Frey notes that increasingly we are expected to ,perform our own tasks.  A.I. is taking jobs away from people who once made plane reservations, collected turnpike tolls, traded stocks, managed our bank accounts, kept our medical records.  We are now expected to repair our own computers and printers.  If we can’t figure it out, there is probably a YouTube video.

Frey notes that when a company shifts work to the consumer, a paid job has disappeared.  The work is still performed, but we perform it.  Labor productivity is improved and corporate profits are increased, but you are doing the work–without pay.  And you probably aren’t doing it very well.