No digitization without representation

From the Stamp Act to AI

 

In 1764, Parliament passed the Sugar Act, which undercut the business of American smugglers by reducing the tax on legal imports and stepping up enforcement. It provoked only modest reaction in the American colonies.

In 1765, Parliament approved the Stamp Act, which trod the toes of two other groups, lawyers and newspaper men, by taxing legal documents and newsprint. The response in America was swift and violent. King George’s government repealed the law, but the damage was done. Lawyers and journalists had come to suspect the worst of the British government and had mobilized against it, with the lawyers spinning legal theories as to why Parliament had no right to tax the Americans, and the newsmen publishing the theories and other anti-British articles.

The lesson for any student of politics was that agents of change need to be careful which groups their new measures are likely to antagonize. If they're litigious by profession, or if they control the media, stand back.

The lesson seems applicable to the recent introduction of artificial intelligence to various forms of software. Labor-saving technology has disrupted the workplace many times since the beginning of the industrial revolution. But for two centuries the jobs that were lost to automation were manual jobs. Occasionally the intellectual classes wrung their hands for the workers, but their heart wasn't in the protest—because their skin wasn't in the game.

AI has changed things. Lawyers are realizing chatbots will be able to do much of what the lawyers currently bill for. AI is eating journalists’ lunch by its ability to comb the web for information and summarize its findings. At the moment its output has to be fact-checked, but that will soon be outsourced to AI too. Not all the lawyers and journalists will lose their jobs. But many will, and the loss will put downward pressure on pay. 

The lawyers and journalists aren't surrendering without a fight. The journalists are suing AI firms, alleging theft of intellectual property in the companies’ scrapes of the web. The courts are mulling the suits. The lawyers are conducting the lawsuits. 

These two groups have been joined by creative types likewise long protected from change by the non-material nature of their work. The strikes by Hollywood actors and writers last year hinged on fears that AI would replace many of them. The strikes were settled but the problem persists. The latest flap involves Scarlett Johansson’s claim that OpenAI stole her voice for one of its bots. OpenAI shut down that voice without acknowledging fault. The fight is just beginning.

Previous fights always ended in the triumph of technology. The workers held out longer or shorter, depending on the nature of the technology and the leverage of particular workers, but they defeated the technology.

The lawyers and journalists will put up a good tussle. Already the shift in attitudes toward AI has been striking. In the early days of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, boss Sam Altman was treated as the second coming of Steve Jobs. But Altman is losing the current round to ScarJo in the court of public opinion. And Microsoft, which just announced its Copilot’s ability to remember and recall every web page visited by a user, is being branded the latest version of Big Brother.

The battle will shift from the courts to Congress. Here the talents of the lawyers and the journalists will make themselves particularly felt. Many members of Congress are themselves lawyers. By the count of the Congressional Research Service, 30 percent of the membership of the current House of Representatives and 51 percent of the Senate hold law degrees. They're going to look very closely at anything that threatens the profession most hope to retire to.

Journalists these days are more split along party and ideological lines than at some other times in America's past. But one thing both sides can agree on is the continuing need for journalists–the human kind.

The lawyers and journalists of the 1760s helped trigger a revolution in Anglo-American politics. In that case they were leading the revolutionary charge, and their side won. Amid the current AI revolution, they're on the side of the status quo. Good luck to them. They’ll need it.