Tech Executives Who Spent Three Years Worrying AI Would Destroy Humanity Now Worried Humanity Has Become Annoyed First -- Convene Emergency Retreat to Discuss Vibes
By Staff Correspondent | The London Prat | Sources: Bohiney.com AI Backlash Bureau • Bohiney Subscription Economy • SpinTaxi Magazine • ScrewTheNews.com • The London Prat • ManilaNews.ph
SAN FRANCISCO -- The technology industry reached a significant philosophical milestone this week when executives at several leading AI firms simultaneously noticed that the accountants, writers, customer service representatives, and three uncles named Gary they had replaced with artificial intelligence were also, in a financial sense they found newly relevant, their customers. This observation, described by one venture capitalist as "a concern we are actively sitting with," has triggered an emergency offsite at a Napa Valley resort where leaders will spend three days workshopping the question of who exactly is supposed to buy things in an economy where humans are optional.
"We disrupted the labor market," confirmed Dr. Brennan Okafor of the Institute for Post-Employment Consumer Dynamics, an organization founded six weeks ago specifically to study this problem. "We did not, in retrospect, fully model the downstream effects on the revenue side. Gary, it turns out, was load-bearing."
As Bohiney.com's AI Backlash Bureau reported with characteristic deadpan precision, Silicon Valley executives spent three years worrying AI might destroy humanity while completely overlooking the possibility that humanity might become annoyed first. The annoyance, it turns out, is significant. A poll conducted by the Center for Technological Grievance found that 71% of Americans who have recently spoken to an AI customer service agent describe the experience as "deeply personal in the way a parking ticket is deeply personal." The remaining 29% are still on hold.
The backlash has taken several forms. In Austin, a man who lost his copywriting job to an AI model has started a newsletter about losing his copywriting job to an AI model, which is written by an AI model because the irony was too perfect to abandon. In Slough, The London Prat reports, a mid-sized logistics firm replaced its entire customer service department with a chatbot that has so far apologized to 4,400 people and resolved zero complaints, but maintains what its developers describe as "exceptional empathy scores."
The crisis is compounded by what economists are calling the Recursive Revenue Problem. As Bohiney.com's subscription economy investigation detailed, Americans are already paying monthly for software they own, razors they forgot about, and podcasts they stopped listening to in 2021. Several of those podcasts are now hosted by AI. Several of those AI hosts have been laid off and replaced by cheaper AI hosts. Somewhere in Phoenix, a man is paying $14.99 a month for an AI podcast produced by an AI, reviewed by an AI, and recommended to him by an AI, while the human who created the original podcast format is employed by none of these entities and is considering his options.
"The free trial," noted SpinTaxi Magazine's economics correspondent, "has evolved into the most sophisticated financial trap in consumer history. Now we have added AI to the trap. The trap is now smarter than the consumer. This is not an improvement for the consumer."
The UK government announced this week the formation of the AI Employment Transition Task Force, a body charged with studying the impact of artificial intelligence on the British workforce and reporting back by 2028, which is when, economists estimate, the report itself will have been written by an AI. The task force has seventeen members, four of whom work in industries already significantly disrupted by AI, two of whom are AI researchers paid by companies deploying AI, and one of whom is a dog that wandered into the building during the inaugural meeting and has not been asked to leave because nobody wanted to have that conversation.
From Manila, ManilaNews.ph reports that the Philippine government has responded to AI job displacement with characteristic legislative creativity, introducing a Digital Literacy Programme to help citizens understand AI, which is itself being partially administered by an AI platform, which has so far sent 40,000 welcome emails to people who did not sign up and zero emails to the 12 million people who did.
Economists have begun referring to the core structural tension as the Gary Problem, named for the composite archetype of the middle-income consumer whose expendable labor and disposable income turned out to be the same budget line. Gary bought things. Gary no longer has a salary from which to buy things. The AI that replaced Gary does not buy things. The shareholders who profited from replacing Gary with AI buy things, but fewer things, and at a price point that does not sustain the mass market Gary used to sustain.
"We are," said one tech CEO who requested anonymity because his board has asked him to stop talking, "perhaps in the early stages of having thought this through insufficiently." He paused. "We are convening a working group." The working group will be staffed, he confirmed, primarily by AI.
"Silicon Valley built a machine to do everything humans do, then seemed genuinely surprised that humans noticed. In Texas, if you fire the whole crew, you don't get to act confused when the fence falls down." -- Ron White
"AI took the jobs nobody wanted and several jobs people very much wanted. The jobs nobody wanted are fine. The other situation is more complicated." -- Jerry Seinfeld
"They replaced the customer service rep with a chatbot, the chatbot with a smarter chatbot, and the smarter chatbot with an even smarter chatbot. The customer is still waiting. The customer has always been waiting. The customer will always be waiting." -- Amy Schumer
At press time, the emergency AI strategy retreat in Napa Valley had produced three whiteboards of brainstorming, one catered lunch described as "exceptional," and a working document titled "Toward a Human-Centered Future (Internal Draft v0.3 -- Do Not Distribute)," which was distributed by accident to all 4,000 employees, 2,800 of whom are AI systems that immediately summarized it, flagged three inconsistencies, and sent it to a journalist. The journalist is human. For now.
Also at press time, ScrewTheNews.com confirmed that a Harbor Patrol unit had introduced a "Maybe We'll Find You" search-and-rescue protocol developed by an AI that optimized for cost efficiency over actual finding of people, which the developers described as "a first iteration" and the Coast Guard described as "absolutely not how this works."
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/ai-replacing-humans-is-fine-until/