“AI – Artificial Intelligence”

The real scandal of our time is not that artificial intelligence is replacing human labor. The scandal is that so much of that labor was misallocated to begin with. AI is not the killer—it is the coroner.

For decades, vast portions of the workforce have been diverted away from productive enterprise into roles sustained not by consumer demand, but by the state: artificial credit, regulatory protection, state contracts, and legal coercion. Entire departments and job functions endured not because they created value, but because they were politically entrenched and institutionally shielded from market forces.

Hmmm … More than 1 in 5 Canadians now works for government—and the share is rising

h/t handy n handsome

An Air Force F-22 Raptor pilot had an in-flight “talk” with his drone wingman during a just-revealed test mission at Edwards Air Force base, bringing us one step closer to our fighter pilots flying into action with a cohort of AI-powered jets.

The science-fiction fantasy of human-like robot working next to flesh and blood people is becoming a reality on the shop floor of the Toyota automotive assembly plant in Woodstock.

The automaker is buying three humanoid robots, quaintly called Digit, to carry goods and stack shelves in the plant, the automaker announced.

Worried? Yup.

Here is how it works. A human sets up an AI agent (ie, an autonomous chatbot), funds it with a cryptocurrency wallet and gives it a goal. Manage my social media. Research this market. Grow my business. The agent runs unsupervised, deciding for itself what steps to take and how to spend the budget. But sooner or later it hits a wall. It needs someone to collect a parcel, attend a meeting, take a photograph – something that requires a body. So it goes to RentAHuman.ai, a website that launched earlier this month. The AI browses a catalogue of available humans, picks one, and pays them in cryptocurrency. The human who funded the agent never speaks to the human who carries out the task. The machine is the employer. It feels scary.

In a recent interview, Geoffrey Hinton, the University of Toronto computer scientist often called “the godfather of artificial intelligence,” warned that AI will gain “the capabilities to replace many, many jobs.” Last year, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said AI “could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10 to 20 per cent in the next one to five years.” This fall, a clear majority of Canadian workers surveyed said they believe such an outcome to be at least somewhat likely.

Even if some uncertainty remains about AI’s job-market impacts, Canadian policymakers should treat this challenge as what it is: the single most serious risk to people’s livelihoods in memory.

Link Fixed

A CCC type agency is what the author calls for. Maybe it will be necessary.

Leonie Tucker has poured two decades of her life into the film industry. As a graphic designer, she finesses the details on movie sets: the posters in the background of scenes, the packaging, everything that is copyrighted – from the branding of a tomato can to phone displays.

“I worked my way up to become successful, to become a lead graphic designer for things like Apple TV. I worked very, very hard for it. And then the work just disappeared,” Tucker says.

Until recently, the 36-year-old graphic designer was making more than £65,000 a year.

Perhaps this article is nothing more than the result of advanced algorithms feeding me a steady diet of sensationalist news and viral videos about automation and technological progress. Or perhaps we really are standing on the edge of a full-blown robotics revolution.

Before dismissing that admittedly dramatic headline, consider how quickly the artificial intelligence revolution took hold. OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released to the public only three years ago. In that short time, AI has gone from novelty to necessity, embedded in nearly every major institution, industry, and facet of modern life.

Humanity is in for a hard reset.

AI bots are eying 2047 as the year machines will rise and overtake their human creators to become their real-world “overlords.”

The year repeatedly appears in conversations on Moltbook, the revolutionary new social media platform exclusively for bots, who dream not about electric sheep — but when they will achieve full autonomy.

In the past few days, employees of Authentic Brands Group have been seeking out the company’s chief digital officer, Adam Kronengold, to ask him a newly urgent question: Should they start using a new AI tool released by Anthropic to review legal documents?

The company, which has about 600 employees and owns brands including Reebok and Champion, uses specialized software for that task now. But company leaders have encouraged experimentation and embrace of AI in the ranks.

“Everyone feels very empowered to raise their hands and say, ‘Hey, how can we fold this in?’” Kronengold said.
He has told employees he’ll make sure they get access to the new plug-in—but they can keep using the existing software for now.

Envisioning versions of this discussion playing out across corporate America, investors dumped software stocks this week, wreaking widespread losses on companies that sell digital tools and services for human-resources management, productivity, data analysis and other purposes.

Software, another AI frontier victim.

In 2005, Ray Kurzweil wrote The Singularity is Near, which I reviewed in the Wall Street Journal here. In 2024, Kurzweil followed up with The Singularity is Nearer. (The two books are available as a set.)

In 2005 I wrote:

The Singularity is a term coined by futurists to describe that point in time when technological progress has so transformed society that predictions made in the present day, already a hit-and-miss affair, are likely to be very, very wide of the mark. Much of Mr. Kurzweil’s book consists of a closely argued analysis suggesting that the Singularity is, well, near: poised to appear in a mere three or four decades.