By ELSIE EYAKUZE

More by this Author

Since ChatGPT was released to the public a couple of years ago, our imaginations have been gripped by the obsession with how many jobs this is going to replace. Writers especially get prodded: We are going to be replaced by sophisticated LLMs any day now!

This is said with some relish by people who seem to look forward to having their news and opinions cooked and delivered to them a la carte by nice little bots who won’t upset them with “thinky, liberal content.”

Little do they know that we have been living in a version of this dystopia for a while now.

Newsrooms around the world are struggling: Between the capitalist owners trying to squeeze every ounce of profit out a rapidly changing industry, the 24-hour news cycle, Rupert Murdoch and Artificial Intelligence, they are under severe pressure. A few people have had the good grace to notice that the quality of written pieces in particular has been deteriorating: Articles are shorter, grammar is too simple at times.

Read: EYAKUZE: Is it really easy to mimic humanness?

The bots have, indeed, been in the newsrooms for a while now.

As I started composing this article, there were parades and festive gatherings of workers all over the country. International Labour Day is a public holiday here and it is one of our Big Ones: We celebrate it at the national level.

I hope this never changes, but it is already a nostalgic sensation in a world where human labour is increasingly being eroded by automation. Soon, this celebration might become a relic, a reminder that once the Industrial Revolution was the pinnacle of our achievements.

But now we are in the Information Age, and with these Large Language Models running around why was I still chained to my desk on a public holiday?

Because of the difference between work and labour. Work is everywhere: Mitochondria are working, plants that grow are working, eating them is work, thinking about how many ways one can cook a delicious potato is work — and love. You get it, everything is work: Life itself is work. Work is love. Love ain’t going nowhere, not for humans.

Labour, however, especially wage labour, may be doomed to extinction as automation takes over more and more of the business of production. Of course, I want to see us continue to shift away from slavery to machine-assisted plenty, its kind of an especially salient point for Africa.

We have been in a post-scarcity situation for a longer time than capitalism would like to admit but, at least, we are now experimenting more publicly with models of Universal Basic Income. If we get it right, those children mining cobalt in the Congo and harvesting cacao pods in Ghana may grow up to consume the products that we crafted out of their childhood misery.

So, bring on the LLMs and the clever drones and the dexterous androids, they come in peace.

Nothing need change, except our economic systems — profit is overrated anyway. In a post-scarcity utopia — this is not impossible, folks — labour will become a matter of choice. I look forward to a May 1 years from now, writing about the nature of labour wherein I get to discuss the question of robot rights in response to the publications of an AI colleague.

Work ain’t going nowhere.