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Judging by recent commercials extolling the virtues of artificial intelligence, many Americans today feel a great deal of pressure to perform everyday intellectual tasks. Apparently, expecting a person to figure out how to do a small repair, text a friend, or cook for a child on their own is too much. Not to mention reading.
I have a perverse favorite of these ads: Apple Intelligence. (You can find it on YouTube, in Apple’s archived footage, which I would criticize if I ran the company, but who’s asking me?) A 50-something black man named Lance sits down at a plain, uncluttered conference table, surrounded by his co-workers. Someone asks if he’s read the “prospectus,” and Lance decides to lie. Of course he has! “Oh, yeah,” he replies, his face radiating a guilty, naive dishonesty. “It was great.” While this is happening, he’s asked to present a briefing to the team. And then, as the crisis mounts, a slightly surreal comedy ensues. In full view of everyone, Lance slowly wheels down the hallway in his wheelchair to consult with Apple’s AI about the prospectus, which is already open on his laptop. The machine generates a few summary statements, and Lance, feeling confident, slowly returns to his seat at the table, ready to speak. “Okay, guys,” he says, looking at his puzzled colleagues, “let’s talk about the prospectus.”
The ad mocks us: Lance is not exactly a hero, like his silent colleagues. Still, the goal is to sell us something, not so much a consumer product or an interface, but a way of life free from the tedious intellectual tasks of reading a text and then retelling it. Growing up, black boys were constantly told that they had to be twice as good as their peers — in understanding, writing, thinking, and communicating — or they would be kicked out of the classroom. Perhaps Lance is a testament to progress: be deliberately mediocre, even forget how to read — who needs that?! — and succeed. Young Frederick Douglass, while enslaved, risked breaking the laws of his time by learning to read from white boys in Baltimore. Literacy was a symbol of the greater freedom that Douglass would later find. But those days are over, aren’t they? Let’s end that struggle once and for all.
Lance seems to be a middle manager with unclear authority. He’s advanced enough to speak up in meetings, not just take down minutes (another role the AI is happy to eliminate; if you want it, it will monitor you and take notes), but still subservient enough that he can be called on at an inconvenient moment without prior consent or warning. Senior executives now sometimes play the role of so-called “creatives,” ostensibly executing corporate and technological maneuvers with the sensibilities of artists. But a man like Lance is a train on a track, unfurling his career with a predetermined energy. When called on, he says: It’s work.
He doesn’t seem to enjoy his job. I don’t blame him for struggling to get through a few homework assignments. A new ad for Plaud, an AI-powered note-taking tool powered by GPT and other inferential tools, shows a Lance-like office drone drowning in the jargon of a meeting for which he’s taking notes: “KPIs,” “optimization,” “ROI,” “stakeholders,” “results.” He then calmly presses a button on a small device that begins recording and transcribing what people in the room are saying, then offers “instant insights.” Many of these new gadgets are explicitly presented as solutions to the overwhelming boredom that pervades today’s corporate culture. The preferred state, it seems, is a detached semi-presence, where the worker is physically present but spiritually absent.
I wonder what else Lance does, what freedom he thinks he gains by allowing some whirring machine to replace his thinking abilities. Does the man who so disdains texting during the day insist on reading aloud to his kids at night? (In a Qualcomm Snapdragon ad, a father is so shaken by his wife’s brief absence—she’s working late—that he has to ask the AI what to feed the kids. The AI also helps him “invent” a bedtime story. No improvisation at home for these types.) Does he read the newspaper to stay informed? Does he have serious conversations with his wife? Does he go to a homeless shelter, a community board meeting, a church, or a soup kitchen to check in with his neighbors and make sure they’re okay? Does this guy even have friends?
I don't know. These things take effort. He seems a little sad to me. I find it much easier to picture Lance in bed at night, his face illuminated by the screen of that same work laptop, just a browser tab away from that pathetic, unread brochure.
Sourse: newyorker.com
