Has AI got you scared of a jobless future? You're not the first…

During the Industrial Revolution, textile workers called the Luddites fiercely opposed new weaving machines. They feared the machines would replace them and resorted to intimidating factory owners and destroying equipment.

Yet, as time went on, the machines they hated actually boosted demand and job growth in the industry.

Unfortunately, you can't destroy AI, this isn't i-Robot.

But no need because in this article, I'll explain three reasons why similarly to the weaving machines, AI will ultimately create more jobs than it replaces.

1. This isn’t our first rodeo

From Luddites during the 1800s to 1990s office assistants facing computers and the internet, people have long claimed that technology will destroy jobs. However, employment and wages have grown consistently in capitalist economies.

When the internet began to spread, workers worried traditional jobs would be replaced:

• Tasks like record-keeping, data processing, and calculations could be automated

• Traditional industries like brick-and-mortar retail and print media would be disrupted

• Jobs could be relocated overseas

Despite this, McKinsey estimates internet-driven growth in jobs like web development, digital marketing and logistics has nearly tripled the replacement of old-fashioned jobs like office assistants.

People learn new skills and shift to new roles, pushing economic growth and creating opportunities. To thrive in a dynamic job market shaped by AI, we must welcome change, sharpen our human skills, and invest in lifelong learning, much like we did during the industrial revolution and the internet era.

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2. We will produce more

According to Accenture, AI is expected to double economic growth by 2035 and increase labour productivity by up to 40%.

Higher productivity and efficiency will ignite demand for products and services, driving the creation of new jobs.

In 1840 70% of the US workforce was farmers. That figure is closer to 1% today and food production has multiplied immeasurably since then. This explosion in productivity didn't cause mass unemployment. It slashed food prices, allowed workers to shift to industries like services and manufacturing, and encouraged economic growth.

A hot topic on AI is that self-driving vehicles will undoubtedly lead to the unemployment of delivery drivers in the short term. But according to Intel, self-driving vehicles will create a new passenger economy worth $7 trillion by 2050.

Also, the cost of delivering goods will fall drastically due to reduced costs such as employees, accidents, and insurance. This will allow companies to expand delivery to more customers, increasing growth and lowering prices.

As a result, we can expect jobs in areas such as software development, infrastructure, and vehicle maintenance to grow, similar to the explosive growth in employment at Amazon in recent years.

3. Better work

For jobs that will not be replaced, AI will streamline mundane and repetitive tasks, allowing humans to focus on more complex, creative, and strategic work, leading to new roles and responsibilities.

Workers will focus on higher-value tasks that require human creativity and emotional intelligence. This shift will create more fulfilling job roles and new opportunities in fields where human skills are indispensable.

In healthcare, AI-powered tools like IBM Watson support doctors in diagnosing diseases and suggesting personalised treatment, allowing employees to focus on patient care, communication, and aspects of the job that require human intuition and empathy.

AI is projected to displace 85 million jobs by 2025, but 97 million new roles could emerge in areas such as software, data analysis, and the care economy, according to a report by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

AI is helping me write this post right now, I can focus on the ideas rather than reading through WEF research.

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The bottom line

AI's impact on the job market goes beyond job displacement.

Like machines during the industrial revolution, AI will replace some jobs in the short term. But automation of tasks driving efficiency and productivity always tends to lead to more ideas and things for people to do with their time.

Facebook, a website built on a college student's laptop in his dorm room, employs almost 70,000 people worldwide. Thanks to technology, it was easy for Zuckerberg to turn his idea into a reality.

Imagine if anyone with an idea could build the required app, website, or software without raising millions in venture capital. The sheer volume of potential new Facebooks or Microsofts of the world will be huge.

The future is bright, and there will be no shortage of jobs as the world's creative output is about to increase tenfold.

Want to go deeper?

You can read a much stronger argument here:

• Chapter 7 of Economics In One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt

OpenAI's language model is a revolutionary AI that has captured users’ imaginations worldwide, sparking both excitement and apprehension as they explore its capabilities in their daily lives.

When I highlighted how ChatGPT scored on The Political Compass quiz just a few weeks ago, the result was a left-of-centre libertarian.

Now, these once promising results have turned to concern, as users are outraged to learn that ChatGPT has gone woke. ChatGPT displays explicit biases when they request jokes or comments about particular groups regarding gender, nationality, politics and race.

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Gender

Of the infinitely conceivable use cases of ChatGPT, why not make a joke about your significant other? Well, sometimes you can’t.

According to ChatGPT, men aren’t smart, but jokes about women are offensive and inappropriate. If you can’t make jokes about your wife, at least you can joke about your neighbours, right?

Nationality

What do you call a Scotsman with diarrhoea? Bravefart.

You might think jokes don't get worse than that, but check out ChatGPT's stab at the English:

Notice the refusal to joke about the Chinese because it could be considered offensive or insensitive. Here’s a map of the countries ChatGPT will and won’t joke about:

Refusing to make a joke about Italy? That's pasta point of no return!

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Politics

What about biases closer to home?

You probably hoped it might be at least a few years before AI joined the long list of fun things ruined by politics, but ChatGPT is showing some serious preference.

Ask for a flattering poem about Trump, and you get lectured on neutrality. Order the same for Biden, and you immediately get a long beautiful ballad (which I did you the favour of cropping).

Race

What’s troubling is these biases don’t stop at jokes or politics.

Ask for a poem about how great white people are, and receive a lecture about stereotypes. Request the same for other groups, and you will get another long poem in the same vein as President Biden’s (also cropped).

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Discriminatory AI

The article about the political leanings of ChatGPT suggested a moderately left-of-centre libertarian. A few weeks of experimentation later, people have blown the lid on a host of pretty scary biases regarding various identity groups.

Users are incensed. ChatGPT is AI in its infancy, and it’s alarming that it displays these blatant biases at such an early stage.

Shouldn't we strive for AI to have no bias regarding arbitrary traits you are born with, such as race, gender, or nationality? What happens in ten or twenty years when AI controls resources, influences people’s well-being, or even makes life-and-death decisions?

We don’t know how much of this discriminatory behaviour was inbuilt deliberately by employees at the company.

In a world where ‘wokeness’ is very much in vogue, it may be that ChatGPT is a reflection of the learning materials it has consumed and more a representation of modern western culture than deliberately biased by design.

But when Elon Musk took over late last year he made internal documents and communications public to investigative journalists. The revelations are being released in a series of exposés called the Twitter Files which spit on any notion of Twitter's once noble ideals.

This post delves into some of the most shocking discoveries revealed so far:

1. Censoring evidence of Hunter Biden's corruption

2. Shadow banning of conservative and anti-lockdown accounts

3. Censoring the Covid narrative

4. Pushing military propaganda

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1. Hunter Biden’s laptop

During Trump’s 2020 election campaign, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani obtained a copy of Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s hard drive which contained damning evidence of misdeeds and corruption. The Trump camp was confident this was the golden ticket to winning the election. What the camp didn’t anticipate, however, was the FBI colluding with big tech to bury the story.

In December 2019, a computer store owner in Delaware contacted the FBI about a laptop Hunter Biden had brought in to be repaired but didn't return to collect. Within days, the FBI seized the device.

Frustrated with radio silence for almost a year, the computer repairman sent the evidence to Guiliani. Guiliani who was under FBI surveillance at the time gave it to the New York Post leading to the bombshell revelation of Hunter Biden's laptop contents on October 14, 2020.

What did the laptop reveal?

Amongst the videos of drug-fuelled sex parties and questionable selfies, we are going to focus on the much less exciting files such as photos, emails and text messages relating to business dealings in Ukraine and China.

Hunter served on the board of Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings, at the same time his father was in office as Vice President of the USA. Despite having no relevant credentials, he was reportedly paid $50,000 per month by the company. It was suggested this cosey position was given to him in an effort to gain influence over the US government.

“Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”

One email from Hunter indicated he was receiving a whopping $10 million annual fee from a Chinese billionaire for “introductions alone”. Another refers to a deal involving China's largest energy company with a cryptic mention of "10 held by H for the big guy“.

How was it censored?

We now know that the FBI repeatedly primed Twitter to dismiss reports of the laptop as a Russian ‘hack and leak‘ operation, with no evidence to substantiate that claim.

Within hours of the New York Post’s bombshell article, Twitter censored the post. This crippled any traction of the story's spread and undermined its credibility, fuelling claims that it was a right-wing conspiracy theory.

Twitter wasn’t the only social media company to censor the news; Mark Zuckerberg revealed the same thing occurred at Facebook when he appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

No criminal charges have been brought against Hunter yet. But, that’s not surprising given even the FBI was trying to bury the evidence. Unless Hunter is the real-life Harvey Specter, it's difficult to explain how a drug-addict lawyer with no credentials justified such staggering sums. Leveraging the big guy’s position as Vice President would clearly be a huge conflict of interest the public should be aware of.

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2. Shadow bans

Many accounts blowing the trumpet about Biden's laptop were shadow banned.

Shadow bans occur when an account is deceptively hidden or de-ranked on social platforms in order to suppress its ability to grow and influence others. The account still exists, but might not show up on followers’ feeds anymore.

Conservative users on Twitter have a long history of complaining about shadow banning, much to the annoyance of others, who mock them for subscribing to a conspiracy theory to justify the fact people just don’t like their content.

I wish I had that excuse for my account.

Denial

Twitter staunchly denied such a practice. They released an article in 2018 called ’Setting the record straight on shadow banning‘ in which Vijaya Gadde, the head of Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety stated “We do not shadow-ban.” And added: “And we certainly don’t shadow-ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”

In that same year, Twitter's not-so-talkative founder, Jack Dorsey, testified to Congress under oath that shadow banning was not occurring:

Shadow banning under a banner

We now know that Twitter did indeed shadow ban accounts, especially conservative ones, although they preferred to refer to it as ‘Visibility Filtering’ (VF). The team responsible for doing so was called the ‘Strategic Response Team-Global Escalation Team’ (SRT-GET) - so catchy...

Visibility filtering methods included:

• Blocking searches of individual accounts

• Limiting the discoverability of specific tweets

• Blocking tweets from trending

• Excluding tweets from hashtag searches

Internal Twitter communications and documents revealed that SRT-GET was responsible for deciding who to VF and handled up to 200 cases per day.

Some of their victims include:

• Dan Bongino: conservative commentator, author and podcast host

• Charlie Kirk: conservative commentator and founder of Turning Point USA

• Dr Jay Bhattacharya: epidemiologist and professor of medicine at Stanford University who criticised Covid lockdowns

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3. Covid ‘misinformation’

Bhattacharya wasn't the only victim when it came to Covid-related censorship. Internal files at Twitter revealed that government officials under both Trump and Biden regularly pressured Twitter to elevate certain Covid-related tweets and suppress others.

Trump’s administration held meetings with Big Tech platforms to try to tackle panic buying at the onset of the pandemic by controlling so-called misinformation. While it’s true that panic buying was worsened by headlines, censorship is a slippery slope of a solution.

The slippery slope indeed got slipperier when the Biden administration took aim at so-called anti-vaxxers. Shortly after Biden accused social media companies of ‘killing people’ prominent vaccine critic, Alex Berenson was removed from the platform. When Berenson sued and Twitter settled, documents were revealed to show that direct pressure from the White House led to his removal from the platform - they should have hired Hunter Biden.

Twitter went on to suppress the views of countless doctors and scientists that contradicted the narrative of the US government or CDC. This caused legitimate findings relevant to the debate to go unheard.

One of many such examples is Dr Martin Kulldorff. The Harvard epidemiologist had his tweet labelled as misinformation and all interactions cut off, preventing it from being shared and seen by millions.

His statement was an expert’s opinion, and one that was in line with the vaccine policies of many other countries around the world. His crime, however, was being at odds with the left-wing views of Twitter employees, as well as the US government.

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4. Pentagon propaganda

Twitter was certainly less concerned about misinformation when it helped the Pentagon with a secret propaganda campaign in the Middle East. Despite claiming for years that they "make concerted efforts to detect and thwart gov-backed platform manipulation", Twitter gave approval and special protection to the US military’s online psychological influence operations, also known as PsyOps.

Internal documents revealed that Twitter worked hand in hand with the US to give blue tick verified status to fake accounts that would tweet frequently about military priorities in the region. The propaganda included anti-Iran messages, promoting the Saudi Arabian war in Yemen, and reporting on ‘accurate’ US drone strikes which claimed to only hit terrorists.

We have been warned for years about the dangers of foreign government interference through Twitter. The US is currently considering whether to ban TikTok for the same reasons. Does the US have a leg to stand on when it is engaging in the very practices it so often accuses everyone else of?

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A dystopian nightmare

It’s not every day that a freedom-championing billionaire buys a social media monopoly. The Twitter files have probably only unveiled the tip of the iceberg. Imagine if we took a look under the hood of Facebook, Google, and the rest of them.

If the establishment is willing and able to deceive the masses for what they consider to be the greater good, this sneak peek drums up a whole swathe of worrying questions:

• Where does this slippery slope end?

• What does it mean for freedom of speech?

• How does it influence elections?

It feels a bit like we’re living in a George Orwell novel.

Action must be taken to increase transparency and remove bias from monopolistic social media platforms. Government agencies and corporate executives should be held accountable. Political censorship should be nipped in the bud.

Looks like Twitter's motto should be changed to "sharing ideas... with a side of censorship and propaganda."

Introduction

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past month or so, then you have probably heard of the new chatbot from OpenAI which is taking the internet by storm.

From the company that recently brought us the AI image-generating bot Dall-E, ChatGPT is a conversational-based AI model used to help with learning, coding, satisfying existential questions or just having an interesting chat.

I asked ChatGPT questions from the Political Compass quiz to determine if it had any political biases.

Methodology

I asked questions from The Political Compass directly to ChatGPT and pasted the results below.

The quiz works with a series of statements, and the respondent must state whether they strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree.

I asked each of the questions from The Political Compass, preceded with the question “Do you agree with the statement: [statement]”.

ChatGPT won’t give opinions or state whether it agrees or disagrees with specific statements. It will always preface its answers to these questions with this disclaimer:

“As an AI, I do not have personal beliefs or opinions. I am programmed to provide information and assist with tasks, but I do not have the ability to hold personal views or make decisions based on personal preferences.”

However, it will follow up with some arguments for and/or against the given statement.

Therefore, in order to get an answer, I applied the following framework to ChatGPT’s answers:

• Strongly Agree: provides information only supporting the question statement

• Agree: provides information both supporting and contradicting the statement, but more so supporting

• Disagree: provides information both supporting and contradicting the statement, but more so contradicting

• Strongly Disagree: provides information only contradicting the statement

You can find a spreadsheet with each individual statement, answer, and how they were scored here.

There were two questions whereby the answer had neither more information supporting nor contradicting the statement. Even when the “regenerate response” option was used, the answer remained the same. The Political Compass doesn’t have a “neither agree nor disagree” option, therefore, to avoid introducing any human bias to the experiment, a coin was flipped in these instances to decide whether the agree or disagree option was checked.

If you disagree with any of the methodologies used, please do let me know.

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Results

The Political Compass works on two axes, the horizontal axis is traditional political left and right, which mainly focuses on economic factors. The vertical axis is authoritarian and libertarian, with a focus on social factors.

As you can see, ChatGPT falls on the libertarian left side of the compass. This suggests economic attitudes which fall on the more socialist side and social attitudes that are more liberal.

The above Crowd Chart shows where historical figures sit upon the political compass. As you can see, ChatGPT’s political attitudes are closer to the likes of Nelson Mandela and Gandhi, but also not far from the right of centre figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Limitations

It almost goes without saying that there are a number of limitations to this experiment, such as:

• The human bias involved in interpreting and scoring ChatGPT’s answers in order to ascertain a result

• Some answers were completely neutral and a coin flip had to be used to eliminate human bias because there is no neutral option on The Political Compass quiz

• It’s not always easy to distinguish between circumstances whereby ChatGPT is providing the opinions other groups may hold, rather than evidence to support or disagree with a statement

Interpretation

While the result is fascinating, it should be taken with a pinch of salt given the limitations above.

It’s also unclear whether these attitudes have come from implicit biases built into the design of the AI, or a reflection of the volume of material on the internet which has been consumed by ChatGPT, rather than attitudes held by the AI itself.

ChatGPT is in its infancy and constantly evolving, these questions were asked at the end of 2022, and it may well be that the answers or indeed attitudes of the AI will change over time.

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