AI May Be Coming, But It’s Not Here Yet

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Dan Drezner mentions something today that’s close to my heart. It turns out that he’s been going to a lot of conferences lately and hearing a lot about AI:

There has been one constant running through all of them: people who want to sound savvy keep talking about artificial intelligence as the New New Thing….I confess to wariness about claims of technological game-changers. All too often, I hear colleagues reference AI the way that they would reference “globalization” or “Big Data” — terms so amorphous that there is no consensus about the definition.

On that question and many others, I strongly recommend perusing Michael Horowitz’s essay in the Texas National Security Review, which makes some very useful distinctions. Horowitz points out that AI is more of a continuum than a precise technology. He also acknowledges that the future of AI is far from clear.

This is important. As you all know, I’m a believer in the future of AI, but with a strong emphasis on future. That’s because AI doesn’t exist yet—at least, not in any form that deserves the name. There’s no question that progress is being made—computers writing sports reports, computers winning Jeopardy!, computers telling you where the nearest coffee shop is—but none of that is anywhere close to true human-equivalent intelligence.

To take one example of why this matters, economists often like to say that if AI were really going to put people out of work, we’d see it in the productivity statistics. After all, an economy with lots of AI would produces mountains of stuff without much human intervention, which means that productivity (stuff produced per person) would go up. But all you have to do is pull up the BLS statistics and you’ll see that productivity hasn’t gone up, which means that AI isn’t a threat to our jobs.

This is wrong because it’s backwards. What you should say is: productivity hasn’t gone up, which means there’s no true AI in the economy yet. And that’s correct. In fact, we don’t even have much in the way of “almost” AI. It’s more like “getting closer to almost” AI. As Horowitz says, AI exists on a continuum, and what we have today isn’t very far along.

This level of technology is still useful, but not likely to put many people out of work. Not yet, anyway. But it will. Driverless cars, for example, aren’t true AI either, but in a few years they’ll almost certainly start taking jobs away from a lot of truck drivers. It’s something to take seriously.

But it’s not here yet, no matter how many times you hear marketing boffins buzzing about it. We’ve still got a ways to go.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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