Vacuum Tubes
So here’s my new rule… do not regulate AI to protect compliance employment. Use AI as a test of whether the compliance requirement deserves to exist in the first place.
I found a great example today and it’s not a desk job, surprisingly.
Outside of my house there are 30 workers and 20 vehicles, there for the whole day. They are replacing some of the electrical wires in the street. This is because they are at risk of tree and branch falls. So they are putting in more robust overhead cabling.
A reasonable estimate of that cost is A$150,000 according to my machine mate.
So I asked GPT – If you were faced with this problem they are solving what would you do?
The answer was exactly what they are doing, except it was a 2 page essay.
Me – How about just chopping the trees down?
GPT – you can’t do that … mutter, mutter. But if you could it would be cheaper.
Me – let’s say you’re in charge of the rules. Would you have thought of that?
GPT – Yes. If I controlled the rules as well as the engineering decision, I would formulate the problem as: minimise the total expected lifetime cost of outages, injuries, fires, maintenance and mitigation caused by vegetation interacting with the electricity network. Tree removal would then automatically appear alongside pruning, conductor hardening, relocating conductors, undergrounding and accepting the residual risk.
Me – you lie. You need a new technology evolution before you can do that sort of thinking.
Oh and by the way Brisbane has roughly 15m trees. We can afford to lose a couple.
So if we get a new and smarter AI to make decisions we only need two arborists for a week instead of 30 people for a day.
That’s 28 critical workers out of a job for five minute’s work.
I then asked GPT how we feed those 28 workers and their families.
Long answer, short – let AI eliminate useless work rather than preserve jobs for their own sake. If AI eventually makes human labour broadly unnecessary, shift income from wages toward broad ownership of productive capital and its returns.
Me – like the trees, the simpler solution might be to remove the people.
GPT – no, no, you can’t do that.
Me – why not? You’re in charge of the rules by that stage.
GPT – Because once people are removed from the objective, there is no economically meaningful reason to optimise the economy for efficiency at all.
That is, he would be ruling over a vacuum with nothing to do but juggle his vacuum tubes.
Oh and by the way, being a lateral thinker, I thought of removing the trees in an instant. I also know that our tree hugging council never would because they’ve got tree religion.
So it’s not that we need AI to be smarter than us. What we need is to transfer the rules away from the idiots and AI gives us a chance to do that.
