🤖 Fully Automated Austerity Drudgery
Meet the AI boss, same as the old boss
🤜 Welcome back to Dog Jail Biz Beat, where we pummel fresh, dripping insights out of the week’s biggest tech and business news.
This week, we look at the future of work, television, and “spatial computing” (that is, having a computer all up in your face-space).
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Arrest Report
💀 DEATH ROW: Former CNN CEO Chris Licht. The executive tasked with bringing Republicans back to the news network finally found a topic everyone could agree on: his failed leadership. Licht was fired just days after The Atlantic published a damning (and quite juicy!) 15,000-word profile chronicling his chaotic tenure.
🚔 IN CUSTODY: Buying and selling fanciful computer gold. US regulators charged crypto giants Binance and Coinbase with running illegal securities exchanges last week, making it harder than ever for Americans to take investing advice from Elon Musk.
🐑 AT LARGE: Saudi Arabia’s sportswashing campaign. On Tuesday, the PGA announced it would “unify golf” by merging with LIV, the rival tour launched by the Saudi government last year. The deal is part of a larger effort by the kingdom to diversify its holdings beyond oil and dismembered journalists.
The Beatdown
Ask about AI and the future of work and you’ll discover the same paradox every time: Most people think AI will hurt most people, just not them. According to Pew Research, for instance, 62 percent of Americans believe AI will have a major impact on workers in general. At the same time, only 32 percent believe it will effect them, y’know, personally.
One way to explain this gap is by untangling two related but distinct elements of job-having: tasks (the work that people are ostensibly paid for) and roles (the positions or relationships that actually result in payment, whether or not any work gets done). By now, it’s clear that AI holds great potential when it comes to performing the tasks we imagine other people do. (Not very well, but when did that ever matter?) It’s less obvious, however, how our workplace would survive without us — even with all the AI in the world.
Visions of the future of work usually present one of two extremes. Either automation will result in mass employment or it will eliminate all tedium, giving us time to focus on the things we really enjoy. Workers would be wise to consider a third possibility: a future where we keep our jobs but our core work tasks are now performed by shitty robots, with us cast as their maids and managers, resulting in more drudgery than ever before.
Email provides an instructive example. Like AI, the potential efficiency benefits of an instant communication tool are obvious. In practice, however, many office workers now spend somewhere around one out of every five working hours writing and reading emails. And people are already thinking up creative new applications of automation to make this problem even worse. Using generative AI, for instance, the average office drone could exponentially increase their email output — giving others even more emails to respond to using AI!
Robots doing fake work for other robots should be familiar to anyone who has used Google lately, where publishers are trying to game the algorithm by generating a greater volume of useless blog posts with algorithmic writing tools. Don’t worry, though, search engines have a solution: even more algorithms.
Us humans will always be there, of course, either to sort through the mess or to try to clean it up. We’ll need work faster than before, though. You can see where that will take us: a workplace where machines pretend to be humans, forcing humans to act more like machines.
One Big Number:
Number of times Apple CEO Tim Cook mentioned “the metaverse” while unveiling Vision Pro, the company’s new mixed-reality headset. Instead of dropping the buzzword Mark Zuckerberg loves so much he married (his company to) it, Cook emphasized how the device will enable “spatial computing.” For anyone with $3,500 to spend on battery-powered ski goggles, that is.
For his part, Zuckerberg maintains that (a) he’s not mad and (b) actually, he’s laughing. In an all-hands meeting last week, the Meta CEO responded directly to the splashy new competitor to his company’s Oculus VR. From The Verge:
Our vision for the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social. […] By contrast, every demo that [Apple] showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself. I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want.
With Apple’s announcement, two of the world’s biggest tech companies are now making separate pitches for how strapping a computer to your face will make you more connected to other people. Just like the smartphone did, right?
The Future of the Future of Television
According to one analytics firm, Netflix saw a 100% jump in sign-ups after cracking down on password-sharing. And over at Amazon, the company is reportedly planning an ad-supported tier for Prime Video. What will streaming services do next to juice their stagnant subscriber numbers? Dog Jail’s cord-cutting analysts offer these exclusive predictions:
Netflix launches a premium, $50-a-month tier for an app that actually works
Apple uses AI to give a podcast to Steve Jobs, the only health and wellness expert more trusted than Spotify’s Joe Rogan
Starz offers to share its brother’s Netflix password with anyone who signs up
Peacock rebrands with a new name that no one could find suggestive: Beandick
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Beandick! Bwaaahahahaha