AI is no joke, but comedian Jon Stewart always seems ready to laugh at the emptiness of a potential human-assisted robot takeover. After all, this is his style.
Last week, former presenter Daily Show for over ten years now, and the current part-time moderator has stopped by City with Matthew BelloniA podcast from The Ringer. In contrast to Paul Revere’s late-night revival, Stewart warned listeners about how fast and potentially devastating the AI invasion could be.
“It will catch up with everyone and lead to a destruction of the workforce like we have never seen,” he told Belloni, comparing it to the Industrial Revolution because it changed the course of history. And unlike other historical periods of economic change, he expects the AI revolution to happen overnight.
“The AI is going to fuck this thing in a week when it finally comes online,” Stewart said. He described it as an accelerated version of the level of destruction that the automobile and industrial revolutions wrought on the workforce.
Discussing how AI is learning how humans do things to make them more efficient versions of what they do, Stewart noted: “We are aiding and abetting our own destruction; it doesn’t make any sense.”
He added that the public is likely only seeing a basic version of what Silicon Valley has to offer, and that fully realized confidential versions of their products are likely “scarily capable of replacing 70% of the workforce.”
Calls for AI regulation have grown louder lately, mostly on the Hollywood stage for now, but a storm is approaching. Creatives in music industry, as well as the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) pushed back against the unrestricted use of AI as potentially harmful to the arts in general and to their work. Managers could outsource their work as they fight for fair wages. This is likely just the first wave of many, Stewart said. He warned that it is not just for small fish. The sharks that have befriended Silicon Valley will likely end up being threatened as well.
“If you don’t think this is going to affect the development executives and everyone else, you’re wrong, brother,” Stewart warned.
Last February, Tyler Perry said he put his multimillion-dollar studio expansion plans on hold after seeing OpenAI’s Sora video generation technology. Expressing his concerns about job losses, Perry said that at the rate technology is advancing, it feels like “everyone in the industry is running a hundred miles an hour to try to catch up, to try to put up guardrails.” Insisting on government involvement, Perry predicted that AI would disrupt other industries as well.
“AI will not replace you, a human who can use AI will,” and similar phrases are becoming increasingly common among executives and rich entrepreneurs alike. But that’s not the whole truth, Stewart said. “They’re telling their shareholders, ‘This will be a way to increase productivity without using labor,'” he said. The real question about AI “is how we can use it as a tool without turning it into a factory,” he continued.
This isn’t the first time Stewart has raised red flags about our rapid march toward an AI-enabled world. “We’ve seen advances in technology before, and they all promised a utopian life without hard work,” Stewart said at the conference. Daily Show this April. “But the reality is that they are coming for our work.”
He warned that Silicon Valley will have to learn to step up its pace if we are to avoid this artificial intelligence revolution. In this sense, the big bang AI “is not inevitable. But unfortunately, it will take a long time to get it back into the bag,” he said.
Of course, the government also had a hand in this, albeit slowly. As Stewart said, “This is the most digital problem solved by the most advanced analog system.” He urged baby boomers in politics to turn themselves into lame ducks, turning to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for help.
He recalled how government officials welcomed social media with the same open arms and are now challenging leaders to hold them accountable for the damage they cause. “How many times before Congress do these guys get calls and say, ‘You’re upsetting all our daughters,’” he said. “When it comes to all this crap, everyone becomes an Urkel,” he said, referring to the much-too-late slogan. Did I do this?