Stoop Work and Actual Intelligence

A look into the future of guys like me

If you don’t know the story of John Henry, the short version is: He dug tunnels for the railroad. He swings a hammer better than anyone ever has. One day, his vindictive boss introduces a steam drill to replace him and his pals. John challenges the steam drill. Miraculously, he wins. Then he drops dead.

But maybe he watched the machine, and considered the nasty disposition of management, and rethought his vocation. Driving steel is over, he decides. He takes his meager savings and his family across the country, trying this and that, before finally landing a decent job as a sand-shoveler at a gravel pit.

Soon, he’s the greatest sand-shoveler the world has ever seen. It’s not quite as dramatic as swinging a hammer, but it’s something. Then one day, the previously benevolent bosses unpack a giant crate. It’s a steam shovel. By now, John Henry is too old and too tired to start over.

Maybe that’s a song - a sad-sack album track on a Springsteen album.

Wordcount

L. Ron Hubbard is supposed to have written 65 million words. Of course, a lot of them were repeats. Ha!

But seriously, he did. He did it because he was being paid by the word. And he still didn’t get paid boat-buying money until he started a religion.

Since then, writing has gotten easier. If you don’t believe me, just try writing a refutation to that statement on a typewriter and correcting your typos with the old white-ink typing ribbon. You have 30 minutes.

Processing

The word processor is why writing is easier. And this was a big deal when I was a kid. Wang Laboratories made one of the first widely used word processors, and it was a major employer in Massachusetts in the ‘80s, and my father worked there, among other tech companies, mostly as a salesman.

One day, my father called to ask me how to cut and paste, then asked me to slow down while I explained, so he could write it down. When I reminded him that he’d worked thirty years in the tech industry, he said “I was mostly buying guys lunch.”

I didn’t want to know

The other day, under the usual commercial duress-slash-inducement, I used artificial intelligence to write something. And what it spit out wasn’t bad.

Unnerved, I had to go stare out a window for 30 minutes. The good news is that it was a fluke - it never worked well enough to be of even marginal use again. But that was a bad afternoon.

Was that even a problem?

There are other uses for AI, but almost-adequate and often-accurate summaries of websites and other text sources seem to be its crowning achievement so far. The people who are raking in billions in AI investment say that this will save money that companies have been paying writers.

But was that the problem? We were spending too much on writers? That’s why there’s no clean drinking water in Flint, Michigan? That’s why there’s so many folks sleeping under the highways? Is it because we overpaid the writers? Can someone confirm this?

Rub some content on it

It started with content - anything from a string of emojis to a cat photograph to Mahler’s Third Symphony.

Everyone from a teenager angling for free cosmetics to Paramount Pictures talks about creating content, delivering content and leveraging content. The ubiquity of this term is part of a deeper abdication about questions of what’s actually good and what people actually want. After all, they’re just eyeballs. And what eyeballs want is to have content rubbed on them. What kind of content? Don’t worry, we can just A/B test different kinds until the data decides.

This idea opened the door for AI to smother us in a substance that mimics information, but doesn’t necessarily inform. The substance makes it harder for us to actually communicate with one another. It truly is content.

People want something. They don’t always know what it is. But despite evidence to the contrary, people don’t want indiscriminately.

John the Luddite

In another world, maybe John Henry uses his hammer to destroy the steam drill. This is a capital crime, and he has to flee in the dead of night, leaving behind his family and profession.

The company sends a technician to fix the steam drill, but the new-fangled machine requires special parts. They take a while getting to the worksite, and so the boss fires the technician to show his own bosses he can save costs with the best of them. No one knows what to do with the new parts. The bosses get impatient and fire the executive who pushed for the steam drill. No one else dares even talk about a steam drill again.

When the remaining steel-drivers start to grumble, the brass meets their demands. The rails take a little longer to lay. The rail workers and their families live a little better.

Of course, this doesn’t help John Henry. When people talk about him, which they rarely do, they say he drove too much steel and made everyone else look bad. He was clearly unhinged, remember when he attacked that machine?

That could be a song. But who would sing it?

Uh oh, SEO

Everyone seems to agree - we need content. More than that, we need the traffic, the clicks, the measurable data spike, the eyeballs. So you better make that content search-engine-optimized!

SEO content is material that’s expressly written to appeal to search engines. Under commercial duress-slash-inducement, I’ve written SEO content (see “Ulterior Motives”). If you’ve ever encountered SEO content with your own eyes, you’ve likely recoiled. It’s one area where AI might be a better writer than a human professional. Maybe the real aberration is that human beings ever wrote the stuff at all.

When AI writes SEO content, it’s computers talking to computers. It’s another way humanity is continually gamified ever further from whatever it was we said we were about (see “They’ll Wonder What Happened to Us,” next month).

A reward for steam

But writing for SEO is one way to make a buck. It’s stoop work. But hey, who’s not stooping? There’s a lot of versions of the John Henry song. Some of them emphasize the magnificence of John Henry swinging his hammer. Others focus on the showdown with the steam drill, which is as Pyrrhic a victory as could be.

Johnny Cash does an 8-minute version that I used to play to get value from my dollar at the jukebox of a saloon I frequented. It’s about the many other things that John Henry can does. He raises a family. He naps. He eats bread and beans. But the question posed by the legend and the song isn’t who drives steel better. Something close to the actual question pops up in this longer version of the song.

“Now did the Lord say that machines ought to take the place of living?”

Taking a long look at the quote-unquote advances and the entire disposition of the past 25 years, the answer to this rhetorical question seems unsettlingly unsettled, especially for someone who’s fed his family on what he was paid by the word.

Mr. Henry

But maybe John Henry took a look at the steam drill and smartened up. It’s a story, and stories can go where we tell them. What if John said, wow boss, what a great invention, I’d love to learn more about the career opportunities that this efficiency-boosting technology could provide?

The boss gives him a tour of the steel drill, and John becomes a drill operator, then a work boss. Soon he’s running operations at the site. John knows how to spot malcontents and how to talk to them. After all, he used to be one. And, failing that, he knows where to send the Pinkertons to burn down their camps.

Now a junior executive, Mr. Henry’s not so tired after work, and starts reading the newspapers rather than dropping dead. He buys stock in the steel-drill manufacturer, and in the refineries of the petrochemicals that make the drill go. Next thing, he’s got generational wealth.

As John Henry departs this vale of tears surrounded by expectant heirs, he worries mainly worries that his kids won’t know where to send the Pinkertons.

Not much of a song.

Edge of the coin

Writers like to write about AI partly because we hate it. It’s a Jungian shadow. It arouses our suspicions about the cannibalistic nastiness of our bosses, and about the hollowness of our craft.

At the same time, we can’t help but want to write about intelligence, even if it’s the kind of wholly owned intelligence that the world-flattening software giants of the era are trying to necromance into being.

Intelligence is the question

Is it a scam cooked up by chemical interactions and electrical interactions in the brain? Some smart evolutionary biologists and Buddhists say so. Or is intelligence actually the decisive force determining all existence? There are generations of smart monotheists and many clever physicists partial to the anthropic principle who would go that way.

Both answers resonate. And they each have some very strong, well-backed arguments behind them. It’s a coin that seems to have landed on its edge and shows signs of quivering. It’s one or the other. It can’t be both a scam and a definitive cosmic force.

AI and BS

Here are the options, broadly speaking:

• AI is BS, proving that our intelligence genuine, unique and mysterious

• AI is BS, but convincing, proving that all intelligence is BS

• AI is not BS and functions as well as original-recipe intelligence, proving that our own intelligence is an easily replicable farce

• AI isn’t BS, meaning that human intelligence can be imparted to virtually all matter

Indeterminacy

It’s one edge of the larger conundrum of what the world is. Friend or foe? Alive or dead? Harmonious or random? These questions seem to loiter in indeterminacy. That indeterminacy is the closest thing I know to defining of what it is to be alive.

For now, I’m hanging out with the coins that tremble on their edges, trying to collect a paycheck.

Selected bibliography

Ulterior Motives (Content Marketing)

Johnny Cash’s John Henry

A novel (and audiobook) where computers do get as smart as people, and need some tea and sympathy

Danny Jock, who did the image for this piece, and who is taking commissions