David Shapiro: More of us can be replaced with robots than we think

The last time I went into a McDonald’s I was greeted not by a person to take my order, but by an ATM-like device where I selected my burger, charged it to my credit card and was directed to an unmanned counter to pick it up.

At Starbucks I can order coffee from the car via a cellphone app and it’s waiting on a rack when I get to the store.

Walmart and Target have self-­checkout stations where we provide our own human touch, and Amazon has convenience stores where purchases are automatically logged when you put them in your basket and charged to your account when you walk out the door.

Robots work the assembly lines at plants producing all manner of products.

I always figured I was safe from being automated out of a job, that there’s enough creativity in writing that it couldn’t be done by a machine.

Then I read about ChatGPT, a new artificial intelligence chatbot that, given a subject, can research and write articles described as equal to a good high school essay.

Zeynep Tufekci, a Columbia University professor who tested the software for The New York Times, said it wrote answers to her questions that were “cogent, well reasoned and clear” — and could be improved through follow-up questions.

On trickier matters, however, she said ChatGPT “sometimes gave highly plausible answers that were flat-out wrong,” just like clever humans sometimes.

The key point is that like many areas of automation, this is just the beginning of a technology that will become exponentially more capable as more developers become interested.

Between automation and the outsourcing of functions like customer service and technical support, the U.S. faces a possible future in which there isn’t enough work to support our population — and the population isn’t trained for the work there is.

So-called knowledge workers and creative professions aren’t as immune from the change as they think.

The big concern is that like COVID-19 and climate change, we see the disruptive impact of automation coming but have done far too little to prepare.

Public schools that are notoriously resistant to change need massive change in what they teach and how they teach it if our children are to understand the new technology and be able to use it to enrich their lives instead of waiting for it to run them over.

More relevant education must be fairly accessible to all corners of our population.

Of equal concern is a fractured political environment that seems to be leading to a smaller social safety net when we’re going to need a much bigger one as good jobs go to machines. Even former sacred cows such as Social Security and Medicare are under fire.

Claims that we can’t afford our safety net ring of greed; we could well afford caring for our people if wealthy interests that profit from replacing human workers with bots pay their fair share of the social and economic fallout.

Maybe ChatGPT could do better at explaining the obvious.

Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.