GenAI & GenX

For Episode 3 of Just the Flax, we take a tour covering everything from luddites, the Hollywood Actors strike, to Gen X to Generative AI.

Are we “ludding” ourselves into a false sense of job security with AI?

That is a terrible pun, apologies… Keep reading on to find out why.

Let’s try and compare this situation to previous transformational updates in our history and talk about the Luddites first off, to get some context.

The Luddites

The Luddites were a social movement that emerged in the early 19th century during the Industrial Revolution in Britain. They were mainly skilled textile workers who opposed the rapid mechanization and technological advancements of the era.

The Luddites' discontent stemmed from several factors. First and foremost, they feared that the introduction of automated machinery would render their traditional craftsmanship obsolete, leading to unemployment and poverty.

Moreover, they resented the factory owners and the government, as they believed that these powerful entities prioritized profit over the well-being of the workers, leading to long working hours, low wages, and poor working conditions.

The Luddite movement reached its peak in the early 1810s, characterized by acts of sabotage against the newly introduced machines. While their methods were seen as violent, their actions reflected genuine concerns about the human cost of rapid industrialization and the loss of craftsmanship in the face of mass production.

The Luddite movement ultimately failed to halt progress, but it did raise awareness of the need to address the social and economic challenges brought about by the Industrial Revolution.

History repeating itself with AI?

At the time of drafting this blog, a strike by writers and actors has caused Hollywood to pause production on multiple movies and TV shows. I am certainly not referring to this group as Luddites.

American actors started "indefinite" strike action in the middle of July 2023, joining film and television writers on the picket lines.

About 160,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) have walked out, while 15,000 screenwriters who are members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) have been on strike since 2 May.

Both sets of creatives are worried about the use of AI:

Writers – AI may completely remove them from the creative process and rely on completely computer-generated content for scripts.

Actors – The use of AI may end the careers of most of film and TV thespians, leaving only the very few at the top of the movie matrix to earn a living.

Gen X

As someone who just sneaks into the demographic cohort called Generation X (or Gen X), I am intrigued by AI. Not just any old version of AI, but Generative AI (or Gen AI). The Gen X tribe are the ones immediately after the baby boomers (where most of the wealth is consolidated) and before the Millennials (those folk who don’t want to pay for anything).

We grew up before the internet and mobile phones. There was no unboxing of toys on YouTube channels. If we got stuck on a video game, we could ask our friends, or wait for a cheat that may have been issued in a monthly PRINTED magazine. There were no streaming music services. If you liked a song, you could record it off the radio, trying to minimize any vocal crashing by the D.J., or purchase an entire album (cassette).

I remember getting my first games console, the Sega Megadrive, which used games cartridges, an upgrade from the Amstrad 464 (64 k of memory) which would load a cassette and more often than not, time out and you would have to start again.

The point that I am trying to make rather awkwardly is about the evolution of gaming, one technology comes out and is replaced by something different, better, usually more expensive. When I got the Amstrad 464 personal computer, it was more advanced than its competitor the Sinclair Spectrum 64k versus 48k!

When I abandoned my grand plan of programming my own games on the Amstrad, I just accepted defeat and went all out for the Sega Megadrive. Other consoles were available, but I wanted to play the new Sonic game.

My point here is about change being ever present and new technology finding a way to force itself through, disrupting established businesses and creating new jobs and opportunities.

GenAI: New Kids on the Block(chain) :/

We are now living through a shift with the emergence of AI generative tools. Some of these tools are ChatGPT, Bing Chat.

The reason for the word generative relates to the generation of content, be that words or images.

For decades we have been accustomed to using search engines to find the answer to our queries. Search engines use 3 techniques to display what we are seeking information on:

1.       Crawling the web

2.       Indexing information

3.       Ranking results

The new kids on the block in terms of generative AI are reasoning engines.

Displaying relevant and informative results, using a pre-training phase and then a subsequent training phase.

Ed-Ilogue

X Marks the Spot – I wanted to point out that Flax already led with an ‘x’ well before Twitter ditched the bird icon for its new logo and brand. Twitter has cut most of its workforce, including its entire content moderation team (which really isn’t good) and now its logo. One major side effect of the redundancies was other boards of tech companies looking around at each other and saying:

“If Twitter can live without x% of its workforce, then so can we.”

And so it began, the downsizing of teams across all business functions. What was once mostly limited to sales, marketing and central functions (HR, finance, operations) was now open season for technical disciplines, including information security specialists.

Will this latest update at Twitter influence other such radical changes? Time will tell.