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🏠 Special Labor Day edition

Is AI coming for our jobs?

Author

Brett Goldstein
September 05, 2022

Gm. Enjoy this special Labor Day edition of Homescreen. We'll be back with our regularly scheduled programming on Wednesday.

THE BIG DEAL

How AI is shifting the labor landscape

Jason Allen’s AI-generated work, “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial”

For years we’ve been told that the robots are coming for our jobs. In some industries it’s already happening—one study found that AI automation replaced around 400,000 US factory jobs from 1990 to 2007—but with rapid advancements happening in AI everyday, more and more sectors are coming under fire.

This Labor Day we're taking a look at how real the “threat” of AI is, and how it will alter the way we work and the jobs we do.

Art

Last week, Twitter was awash with debate over the story of a game designer who submitted an image generated by an AI text-to-image software that won a state art competition. As you can imagine, critics were up in arms over the fact that the creator, didn’t, you know, create the piece.

He defended himself by saying he listed the tool he used to make the piece, but it’s not his job to explain how the tool works just as it’s not the job of a digital artist to explain how Adobe Illustrator works.

AIs are trained on massive data sets of images to generate their own—images created by other artists. Should someone else be able to leverage the collective might of human artistry to create their own masterpiece with minimal effort?

Bottom line: The creative capacities of AI are only growing in sophistication and with it, the ethical and legal issues. The can of worms has been opened and there’s no closing it now.

Coding

Last year, Github teamed up with Sam Altman’s OpenAI to launch Copilot, an AI plugin that provides suggestions for lines of code inside dev environments. It’s kinda like autofill for coding.

By all accounts developers love (and use) it—Microsoft, who owns GitHub, said that about 35% of the code produced by Java and Python developers was generated by Copilot in a limited test last year.

But the software remains imperfect. Often times Copilot can produce bugs if it was exposed to damaged code in its training data. Even worse, sometimes it reveals personal data like names and emails verbatim from its training set.

Bottom line: AI tools are a great augmentation tool for developers, but not at the level of producing its own bug-free code just yet.

Science

Science and AI have one of the more unique relationships of any we’ve described above. Science will soon be “done” by AI according to Lux Capital’s Josh Wolfe.

Instead of employing AI tools to run experiments designed by humans, Wolfe thinks the equation will soon be reversed—AI will find correlations between old and new data systems or theories and will suggest new hypotheses to try.

Eventually, even the tests will be carried out automatically in digital or physical labs speeding up the number and frequency of scientific experiments.

Bottom line: Provocative? For sure. Practical? We’ll see.

Zoom out: AI is developing at an incredibly fast rate, but as of right now, humans are still putting the labor in Labor Day.

CLICKS

10 most-clicked links from Founders Corner

These puppies attracted more than 8,000 clicks between them. Enjoy.

STATS

5 stats to impress your friends with

Feel free to bust these out at your Labor Day darty.