(From Matthew Crawford substack)
Over the last several years, I realized I was driving around town a lot to take care of little tasks that, in principle, could be done on the telephone, or on the web portal of some business or government entity. The frustrations of entering into that Kafkaesque world of chatbots that are “here to help,” or phone menus that seem imported from some generic template, are such that it is worth taking an hour to drive to the CVS pharmacy, or the DMV, or the UPS store, or some medical practice, and collar a human being. Usually they are able to solve my problem in short order. And increasingly, it seems, they are able to do so because they have some secret trap door that allows them to bypass the public-facing systems that I have to interact with. In the year of our Lord 2025, getting things done often requires finding, not the recent hire who just reads through the prompts on his screen and is trapped in the same hall of mirrors as you, but the guy or the gal with enough institutional knowledge to be able to thwart the system.
AI will get rid of those people. What then? The dystopia I fear is not one in which superintelligent machines achieve self-awareness and wipe out the human race, it is the prospect of a tightening grid of dysfunction and paralysis, achieved through the final victory of “the rule of Nobody,” to borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt. The Nobody cannot be addressed.
Oh sure, there will probably still be a counter you can walk up to, with a very charming robot-lady behind it. Detecting the emotional register of your voice, she will express empathy for your plight. “I understand this can be frustrating. Let me see what I can do.” But this will turn out to be just a creepier version of “your call is important to us,” the real meaning of which is “fuck off, we don’t want to talk to you.”
AI will be the consummation of bureaucracy as regime-type. The official, Weberian appeal of bureaucracy is that it takes discretion out of the hands of individuals, who may abuse it, and subjects decisions to procedures that will be fair and neutral. It depends on having a comprehensive representation of the field to be governed, so one can subject its various parts to a rational calculus. But the conceit that one has such a representation in hand is almost always a fiction, nicely illustrated by the effectiveness of “work to rule” strikes.
These are labor actions where workers don’t walk out, instead they agree among themselves to scrupulously follow all company procedures to a T. The result is that production grinds to a halt, as intended. It does so because the indispensable lubricant that keeps the system running consists of all the informal accommodations that workers make among themselves, the work-arounds and horse-trading. You need to let Larry stretch his cigarette break out as long as he likes, because Larry is the only guy who can keep that one lathe running true, the one that is the real bottleneck in production. That is because Larry knows the exact spot you need to shim the tail stock with a .002 feeler gauge. (He brings one in his pocket, and removes it at the end of his shift — Larry is wise.) But the rule-book says nobody should modify the equipment without submitting a request through the proper channels. OK, then. Good luck, assholes.
The point is that bureaucracies build their legitimacy on the idea that they have rendered the field of forces perfectly legible, and can therefore exert a perfect mastery over them. It ain’t so.
The world of AI will a world in which we have gotten rid of all the Larrys. Good luck, assholes.
