I don't know about you, but my bingo card for generative AI did not include its wiping out the jobs of Kenyans who had for years been writing essays for cheating American college students. Yet here we are, according to an article in the New York Times last week.
That story, plus other surprises from the early years of generative AI, should remind us that our ideas about how the AI revolution will play out should be held lightly. We need to be able to drop ideas immediately when they turn out not to be true and pursue new opportunities as soon as they present themselves.
Let's have a look.
The New York Times article says Kenya had already seen one wave of job losses to AI. Thousands had been employed transcribing recordings of meetings, but such transcriptions became an early task for AI and began to disappear in 2017. Still, ChatGPT created a shock when it debuted in late 2022. At the peak, some 40,000 people in Nairobi were being paid to do homework for others, but almost all those jobs have diminished in scope or disappeared. Why would a student pay someone to write a paper that AI would generate for free?
The article says that "what jobs remain in essay writing are mainly for 'humanizers,' who edit papers written by A.I. to avoid detection from the cheating software used by many universities."
We've seen plenty of other surprises because the backlash against AI caught Big Tech unawares. Any company associated with the hyperscale data centers being used for AI now faces massive pressure because of their water and electricity needs and because lots of people just don't want to live or work anywhere near them. Flock Safety had achieved an $8 billion valuation as it installed cameras around the U.S. to help police track cars used in crimes but has recently stirred up horror about the possibility of a surveillance state.
At a smaller scale, we've seen an Air Canada chatbot go rogue and offer a discounted fare that the airline had to honor. Zillow set up an AI to monitor home prices and purchase undervalued properties, only to find, some $500 million in losses later, that the project was a flop. IBM and McDonald's set up an AI to handle drive-thru orders but canceled the project after customers posted funny, and highly embarrassing, videos of mistakes on orders — such as adding hundreds of dollars in chicken nuggets or bacon toppings on ice cream.
It's easy to imagine where other, important surprises might arise, too. AI will surely have some effect on where people live, because it will change the dynamics of remote work. AI already seems to be having some effect on car sales, because data centers are contributing to increasing electricity prices, which make electric vehicles less enticing.
In the much-quoted framework from the late U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, there are lots of unknowns out there about AI. We can't know much about the unknown unknowns. But we can certainly prepare ourselves for the known unknowns, and I'd argue that all the surprises that have hit us so far — job disappearances, including in Kenya; technology glitches; backlash to AI — fall into the "known unknown" category. (I'd further argue that known unknowns were Rumsfeld's undoing. He should have known that loads of problems could arise after the U.S. occupied Iraq and should have prepared far more for contingencies, rather than assume that Iraqis would place flowers in the barrels of U.S. tanks.)
The history of technology is full of bad ideas — and of pivots toward transformative ones. Alexander Graham Bell initially thought the telephone would be used to broadcast into people's homes — you'd pick up your phone and listen to, perhaps, a symphony orchestra. (Bell also suggested that the standard greeting should be, "Ahoy!" Hmmm....) YouTube began as a video dating site. Slack was a chat channel for a multiplayer game that got left by the wayside. PayPal started as security software for the late, great Palm Pilot, which had a digital payment feature. And so on.
My favorite pivot actually comes from well outside the tech world — from chewing gum. A young man who moved to Chicago in 1891 sold his father's line of soap and offered small amounts of baking soda for free as an incentive to buyers. The baking soda turned out to be more popular than the soap, so he began selling baking soda. This time, he offered some free chewing gum as the incentive. That gum became so popular that, 130 years later, I have a pack of William Wrigley's spearmint gum on my desk.
So my conclusion from the job losses in Kenya (and elsewhere), and from the many other surprises we've seen, is that mistaken ideas about AI are fine — as long we hold them lightly and can move on from them quickly. Think big, because the opportunities with AI are enormous, but learn really fast.
Cheers,
Paul