A.I. First? After you, please.

A month or so ago, I was reading an article in The New Yorker on San Francisco, and whether or not it's in a doomloop. 

A section in the article dealt withe the impact that A.I. is having on the market for downtown office space. A.I. may consume vast amounts of environment-destroying energy, but it also requires less office space. "The great promise of A.I., after all, is to obviate the need for labor."

One of the San Franciscans quoted in the A.I.  graphs was an entrepreneur and investor named Jeremiah Owyang who - and how Bay Area can you get? - "works out of an Airstream." Here's some of what Owyang had to say:

“The A.I. industry is currently, but not for long, composed mostly of humans, and these humans are a social bunch. I’ve been to meetups on the beach, bonfires. I’ve been to house parties. That is their life stage. This is when you get your partners, get your V.C.s.” Such human pleasures wouldn’t last, he said. Workplaces in the industry were transitioning to a model known as A.I. First. “A.I. First means you turn to A.I. before you talk to a human. A.I. First means you turn to an A.I. before you hire. If the A.I. doesn’t do it, you build it. If you can’t build it, then you hire someone.” He added, “That is a precursor of what’s going to happen to corporate America.” 

Turn to A.I. before you talk to a human? One of the great things about working in a physical office was being able to bug a colleague for help, to bounce an idea off someone, to ask someone you trusted for a bit of advice. Not to mention having someone around to bitch about management with.  

Turn to an A.I. before you hire? Will this model eventually turn into a world in which the only people with jobs are those who come up with ideas and those who build the A.I. models to execute those ideas. This leaves most of the human race out. Which leaves me wondering what us normies are going to do for work?

If the A.I. doesn't do it, you build it? Once again, the only folks with job security will be those who can create an A.I. that deprives someone else of a job. Swell!

If you can't build it, then you hire someone? But who'd want to work for a manager, for a company, that would prefer to have an A.I. do the work? 

All this assumes that A.I. is going to be perfected anytime soon, which sure means you have to trust the source of all the inputs the algo ingests in order to make its decisions. We use to say GIGO. Garbage In, Garbage Out. 

Wish I had Alexis or Siri around to ask what they thought about all this. 

As for the Golden Gate Doomloop is going to keep looping and dooming? Yes. No. Maybe. Sort of. Probably not: people love cities, so San Francisco will figure out a way to survive, even if in "the downtown of the future...there will be a smaller, tighter, less worker-oriented place."

So happy that I'm out of the employment fray. And relieved to hear that the doom(loop)sayers aren't writing off cities quite yet.

O brave new world that has such non-people in it.