Something slightly different... some musings on AI and labor
In the heady days of the dotcom boom, we drove out to a Sonoma Valley vinyard owned by the family of one of our investors and board members. Betsy Hambrecht, based in Hong Kong and San Francisco, was the daughter of famed venture capitalist William Hambrecht of Hambrecht and Quist, one of the small group of firms that more or less invented the Silicon Valley model of VC funding of tech companies, with their early investments in and shepherding of Apple, Adobe and Genentech among others.
Once up out of the Dry Creek arroyo, the drive deposited us in front of a modest vineyard work building. I don’t remember a main house. It was just vines as far as the eye could see, all owned by the Hambrechts. We were taking in the view when the person in work clothes I had noticed weeding the artichoke patch under the sun when we drove up, dusted himself off and came over. “Meet my father”, says Betsy. “Bill Hambrecht.”
I do remember thinking then of a science fiction story — the “Midas Plague” — from the 1950s, by Frederick Pohl. It’s never quite left my mind.1 The plot I’ve long forgotten, but not the conceipt: In a society with low- to no-cost energy and fully-automated robot production of goods, wealth would be expressed through simplicity and austerity, the freedom *not* to consume, whereas “poverty” would mean the responsibility to consume as much as possible, endless, gaudy goods. I remember vividly the final scene, with the rich folks running Midas world wrapping matters up over a game of cards on the back porch, playing for matchsticks.
Vintage Sci-Fi! The Midas Plague was a story in Pohl’s collection, The Case Against Tomorrow - so much for 1950’s optimism!
OK, clearly I share one pathology with the leaders of big tech. As a kid I read way too much science fiction! But how come the stories that stuck in my mind were critiques of capitalism, not dreams of the transcendent singularity?
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The story came to mind again when I dipped into some of the current hype around humanoid robots. You can now rent a humanoid robot to do household chores from a company called 1x, sign up at 1x.tech. Ninety percent of the time it will actually be piloted by a human wearing VR goggles (teleoperated - a reminded or another classic scifi meme - Isaac Asimov’s waldos...). Not creepy at all. Actually, so the CEO explained on the Hard Fork podcast, much less creepy — and certainly safer — than having a real live human in your living room. 1x does better background checks!
We want to replace drudgery! Robots to do the dishes. Why is this such an obsession? If it was coming from women and mothers, caregivers, I would get it. But this is from the bros.
See also Yann LeCunn’s 2024 interview on the Lex Fridman podcast, edited a bit but you can see the original transcript here:
Lex Fridman: I think you mentioned loading the dishwasher, right?
Yann LeCun: Yeah.
Lex Fridman: I suppose that’s one of the main problems you’re working on.
Yann LeCun: There’s cleaning up, cleaning the house, clearing up the table after a meal.
Lex Fridman: Sure.
Yann LeCun: Washing the dishes, all those tasks, cooking. All the tasks that in principle could be automated but are actually incredibly sophisticated, really complicated.
….
Lex Fridman: To me, that’s an exciting future of getting humanoid robots, robots in general in the home more and more, because it gets humans to really directly interact with AI systems in the physical space. And in so doing it allows us to philosophically, psychologically explore our relationships with robots. Going to be really, really, really interesting...
Now this was in the context of LeCunn’s ideas about how you need to build sets of interacting models dedicated to different levels of abstraction in order to handle real world tasks, one solution to the puzzle of how we move from current neural networks to potent world models. But this is the problem he was working on! And 1x’s reliance on teleoperators is meant to be temporary, as the teleop versions collect lots of data, meant train later generations of the robots. But the energy of the men in these discussions is considerable, the excitement of having humanoid robots that would do the washing up... very gendered of course, but also so dismissive of the value of human labour.
Just clear up and load the dishwasher boys! It’s a form of love and care for your family and friends that you have around the table.
I think it’s an awareness we need to bring to all of our discussions of AI... we need to not only understand the interests of labor versus capital, but also to value labor more on its own, as an essential, possibly the essential, human endeavour.
To conclude I’d like to point you to another scifi writer, Bruce Sterling, who in a 2017 speech speculated on the forms of organisation we might turn to if labor markets collapse - prisons, labour and refugee camps (”…an engineering solution….you don’t do it to be the villain.”); Retirement villages (“universal pension income...Everybody just learns to mimic the elderly.”); Religious organizations, monasteries and nunneries (“No competition because the robots are all atheists.”); Intentional rural communes (“go back to the land, live next to nature...traditional, romantic, never works. Sucks unless you’re the Amish.”)
While fully-automated luxury communism is one possibility, so is universal robotized poverty. Copyright is a way to ensure that creative labor is valued, and so is an essential tool to shape the future we want, out of all these options.
Also the subject of an essay by Kingsley Amis, so I’m not the only one... in his marvelous collection, New Maps of Hell (1960), he labels the story an example of the Comic (not cosmic) Inferno: “The Midas Plague” does not merely inform us that the results of overproduction may be fantastic, or hilarious, or desperate; it also comments on the revolutions in manners which human beings will swallow—in Morey Field’s world you show your politeness by letting the other fellow pick up the restaurant or bar bill...”
The 1x teleop thing is wild when you think about it. We're basically offshoring domestic labor again but with extra steps and a VR headset. I get the appeal of robots doing boring tasks, but you're right that there's something off about automating care activities that actually build real human connection. Maybe we should be asking why the bros are so eager to replace things like cooking or washing dishes instead of asking if we should.