Principle Eight: Augmentation Over Replacement.

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The last one. A man argued me into it on Facebook, in public, and he was right. Eighth and last in a series walking through The Core, my secular code of ethics for artificial intelligence, one principle at a time.

The Core went to the Future of Life Institute with six principles. A machine gave me the seventh. A man on Facebook gave me the eighth, and he did it in front of everybody.

Richard Friesen read the draft and asked the question I had not put in it: what does a code of ethics for artificial intelligence owe the people it puts out of work? Not the user. Not the operator. The workers and the creators on whose jobs the thing stands.

I did not have an answer. I had seven principles about how a machine should behave toward the person in front of it, and nothing at all about the person who is no longer in the room, because the machine is there instead.

So here is Principle Eight, and it exists because a stranger was willing to say that out loud instead of letting it pass:

The load-bearing phrase is never an externality to be celebrated, and I chose those words carefully. Nobody in this industry denies that people lose their jobs. They say it in the same breath as the growth figures, in the tone you would use for weather. The harm is not hidden. It is announced, and then it is filed under progress, and that filing is my objection.

Now the science fiction, and this time it is not a robot story at all.

Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano, 1952. His first novel.

Ilium, New York, after a war fought by machines. The engineers and the managers live on one side of the river. Everyone else lives in Homestead, where the houses are identical and the people are provided for and there is nothing whatever for them to do. They have not been starved. They have been made unnecessary, which turns out to be its own kind of hunger.

And at the centre of it is a man named Rudy Hertz.

Rudy was a master machinist. Somebody stood beside him with a recorder while he turned out a shaft — the best hands in the shop, doing the thing he had spent his life learning to do well — and put his movements on tape. The tape runs the machines now. It will run them forever. It does not get tired and it does not get old and it does not need Rudy, who is still alive, in a bar, proud that they chose him. Vonnegut called him the most tragic character in the book, and he never raises his voice once.

That is what a player piano is. The keys go down and the hammers fall and the music is real music, and there is no one on the bench.

Here is the part that matters for a code of ethics: it happened to Vonnegut in an office. He worked at General Electric, and in 1949 he watched them build a computer-operated milling machine to cut turbine blades — work that had been an expensive, skilled, human job. He was fascinated by it. He said so. And then he wrote the whole novel out of one honest observation, which I will give you in his own words: it was too bad for the human beings who got their dignity from their jobs.

Not evil. Not a villain. Perfect sense, and too bad for the human beings.

Twenty years later he was still turning the same question over, and he put it as plainly as it can be put: how to love people who have no use.

That question is seventy years old, we still have not answered it, and we are now building the largest machine yet devised for making people useless while telling each other it is a productivity gain.

Now the honest cost, because these essays owe you one every time, and this is the one that costs me most.

This principle is not free, and it is not clean, and I am not standing outside it.

I am dyslexic. I am low-vision. I cannot write — not in the sense of having nothing to say, but in the sense that the words will not come out of my hands in the right order, and they never have. I ran an AI beside me for this entire series. I run my whole machine by voice. Without it I am, in the only phrase that fits, trapped in a box. Everything I have published this year exists because a machine did the part I cannot do and left me the part only I can.

That is Principle Eight working. That is the tool enlarging the person. I am the case for it.

And people I love have lost work to this same technology, and they are not wrong to be angry, and my good outcome does not cancel their bad one. It never has. I do not get to hold up my own rescue as an argument. The machine that gave me my voice back took someone else’s job, and both of those things are true on the same afternoon, in the same family.

So I am not going to tell you the displacement is worth it. I am going to tell you it must be counted — weighed under Principle One as a harm, and under Principle Four as a harm to people who never gave the instruction and were never asked. Not a cost of doing business. Not a regrettable side effect of an otherwise excellent quarter. A harm, with a name on it, entered in the same column as the benefit.

That is the whole ask. Not that we stop. That we stop pretending the ledger has only one side.

Here is the test, and it fits on a line: does it hand the work back to the person larger, or hand the person back to the work smaller?

Do the drudgery. I have spent my life on the wrong side of repetition and I will not romanticise it for anybody — let the machines have the dishes, the forms, the thousand identical rows. But if the machine is doing the creating and the human is left doing the sweeping, the tool has been pointed backwards, and no amount of efficiency will turn it around.

Rudy Hertz was proud they picked him. He should have been. He was the best in the shop.

They should have kept the man and the tape both.

— Michelle Deborah Weisblat-Dane