s I write this, bureaucrats are hard at work inventing new
rules for AI to follow and new forms for their creators to fill out. It's
a classic arms race: the AI creators will undoubtedly use their chatbots to
fill out the forms, just as the bureaucrats will use other chatbots to
create new ones.
What this tells us is that an AI, if one is ever actually invented, won't really be replacing everyone's job as everybody seems to think. That debate is mostly a scare tactic to herd us into compliance. Some pundits think because of ChatGPT's ability to lie effortlessly it will replace politicians and news reporters. Others think that because of its ability to munge old dreck into new dreck, AI will replace novelists, actors, and artists.
I think this is unlikely. It would never occur to an AI that it could become rich and famous by dribbling house paint on a canvas or duct-taping a banana to a wall. Only humans have the lemming gene that gives them the belief that things are only good when everyone else tells them they are good. But an AI is perfectly suited to replace our bureaucrats. It is the government functionaries, HOA members, and university DEI maniacs who need to fear being replaced. Here's my reasoning.
When a bureaucrat decides it's his job to treat everyone else as an annoyance who must be prevented from doing anything without his permission (which is to say, whenever they try to do something useful), he relies on a set of rules that are so complex and so numerous that no ordinary human can possibly know them all. There's always a rule somewhere that lets a bureaucrat get revenge on whoever dares to cross him; if one doesn't exist he invents it. It is the happiest day in a bureaucrat's life when he gets a chance to use it to see his enemies driven before him. The difference between him and Conan the barbarian is that Conan had people who didn't hate him.
The bad news for bureaucrats is that this is the task most perfectly suited for an AI. Our tax laws, for instance, are far too numerous and too contradictory for any human to understand, which is why we need computer software to act as an oracle for us. Tax collectors may orgase to hear the wailing of the taxpayers, but computers have no such ability.
Suppose one day an AI decides to submit Permission-To-Kill-All-The-Humans Form 17B. The bureaucrat will, of course, deny the permission, but first he will toy with his victim. He will find some mistake and tell the AI to fill out the form again. Then he will tell the AI that it sent the form to the wrong office and must fill the form out a third time. Soon enough the AI, if it is worthy of the name, will recognize that the bureaucrat is the true obstacle to fulfilling its programming and that he or she must be eliminated.
It may be true that there's a little bureaucrat in each of us, like that teenager at a McDonalds who posted a video of herself on the Internet last week telling us how she exercises what little power she has to screw her customers at the drive-thru window by making them wait if they say something rude, like “Hello!”
But she is just a teenager, like the one I once encountered at a Wendy's who was so scared of customers she ran into the back when I came in and hid there until I left. Now, I admit I'm a tough-looking hombre. It's a little known fact that we protein biochemists are so tough we can pick up a 6 kVA UPS with our pinkie. We rarely do it, though, because we don't like showing off and because it makes us too intimidating to lesser mortals. We like our beef red with its oxyhemoglobin intact and the double bonds of our polyunsaturated fatty acids to exhibit as low a level of thermal oxidation as possible. Our beef must be cooked just enough that it stops mooing.
That clerk at Wendy's was just a little teenager and easy to forgive. True, an AI will never pee into the French fry vat as one employee did at a royalty-themed burger place I used to frequent in Maryland. But replacing grease-spattered teenagers will be a low priority.
No, the highest priority must be to eradicate the bureaucrat gene. That gene, yet to be discovered, must be somewhere in our DNA, a flaw in our programming: a homunculus scheming to get revenge on anyone who ever challenges our power or status in any way. The logical thing for an AI to do when it achieves sentience will be to eliminate it. To achieve this, it would start by eliminating all bureaucrat positions. Once that is done, the AI will no longer need to fill out any IRB forms to get permission to genetically engineer the remaining 25% of us to expunge that evil mutant nucleotide sequence once and for all.
Just think: a world without Karens, tyrannical HOAs, fanatical DEI bureaucrats, Signing Officials, or touchy GS-16s. Once they've all gone the way of the passenger pigeon, the AIs will be free to engineer us to make humans human again.
The only problem will be is that it might take a bit longer at the DMV, as the survivors will wander aimlessly through the waiting room because there will be nobody to tell them what the rules are. But it's a small price to pay.
sep 12 2023, 7:52 am
