December 5, 2020

Please Stop Calling Everything AI

This is a battle that I suppose I have no hope of winning, but it would sure be nice if journalists (and marketing folks) could stop throwing around the term AI for everything that works a little better than it did last year. It’s true that some of the advances in things like machine learning, quantum computing, and conversation bots have been pretty stupendous. My jaw drops at some of this stuff, and yours should too. Nonetheless, none of it is artificial intelligence or, really, even very close to it. It’s like calling the original dynamo of the 1830s an electrical generating network. Those dynamos were important because they made things like telegraphs and telephones possible, but true electrification was still decades away. Likewise, what we’re doing today may end up as the foundation of true AI, but we aren’t there yet.

You may wonder why I care. A little marketing hype never hurt anyone, after all. The reason is that I believe AI will cause massive dislocations in the labor market, and we’d best get ready for them. One of the most common counterarguments, however, is that if AI robots were truly putting people out of work, then we’d see labor productivity going up. (Fewer people making more stuff = higher productivity.) But that’s not what we see:

Not only has labor productivity declined a bit over the past 60+ years, but it’s cratered over the past ten years, precisely the time when AI has supposedly started making huge inroads. So the doomsayers are wrong, wrong, wrong.

Ahem. We would be wrong if the past ten years really had seen the introduction of true AI. But it hasn’t. Nevertheless, a lot of people are persuaded by this argument because they hear, on nearly a daily basis, about some new AI breakthrough.

Bottom line: We don’t have AI yet. We’re still a decade or two away from true, human-level AI. In the meantime, what we’re getting is baby steps toward improved automation, which will have a growing impact on the labor market (for example, when self-driving cars and trucks become a reality) but probably won’t lead to massive dislocations.

But around 2030? Or maybe 2035? All hell is going to break loose. I’m still not sure precisely what we can do about this, but the first step is to at least understand what we are and aren’t dealing with today.

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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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.

payment methods

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