Why is this Happening, Part I: The Stuff That Sucks

When I was a kid, I had this book called The Star Wars Book of Robots. It was a classic early-80s kids pop-science book; kids are into robots, so let’s have a book talking about what kinds of robots existed at the time, and then what kinds of robots might exist in the future. At the time, Star Wars was the spoonful of sugar to help education go down, so every page talked about a different kind of robot, and then the illustration was a painting of that kind of robot going about its day while C-3PO, R2-D2, and occasionally someone in 1970s leisureware looked on. So you’d have one of those car factory robot arms putting a sedan together while the droids stood off to the side with a sort of “when is Uncle Larry finally going to retire?” energy.

The image from that book that has stuck with me for four decades is the one at the top of this page: Threepio, trying to do the dishes while vacuuming, and having the situation go full slapstick. (As a kid, I was really worried that the soap suds were going to get into his bare midriff there and cause electrical damage, which should be all you need to know to guess exactly what kind of kid I was at 6.)

Nearly all the examples in the book were of some kind of physical labor; delivering mail, welding cars together, doing the dishes, going to physically hostile places. And at the time, this was the standard pop-culture job for robots “in the future”, that robots and robotic automation were fundamentally physical, and were about relieving humans from mechanical labor.

The message is clear: in the not to distant future we’re all going to have some kind of robotic butler or maid or handyman around the house, and that robot is going to do all the Stuff That Sucks. Dishes, chores, laundry, assorted car assembly, whatever it is you don’t want to do, the robot will handle for you.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last year and change since “Generative AI” became a phrase we were all forced to learn. And what’s interesting to me is the way that the sales pitch has evolved around which is the stuff that sucks.

Robots, as a storytelling construct, have always been a thematically rich metaphor in this regard, and provide an interesting social diagnostic. You can tell a lot about what a society thinks is “the stuff that sucks” by looking at both what the robots and the people around them are doing. The work that brought us the word “robot” itself represented them as artificially constructed laborers who revolted against their creators.

Asimov’s body of work, which was the first to treat robots as something industrial and coined the term “robotics” mostly represented them as doing manual labor in places too dangerous for humans while the humans sat around doing science or supervision. But Asimov’s robots also were always shown to be smarter and more individualistic than the humans believed, and generally found a way to do what they wanted to do, regardless of the restrictions from the “Laws of Robotics.”

Even in Star Wars, which buries the political content low in the mix, it’s the droids where the dark satire from THX-1138 pokes through; robots are there as a permanent servant class doing dangerous work either on the outside of spaceships or translating for crime bosses, are the only group shown to be discriminated against, and have otherwise unambiguous “good guys” ordering mind wipes of, despite consistently being some of the smartest and most capable characters.

And then, you know, Blade Runner.

There’s a lot of social anxiety wrapped up in all this. Post-industrial revolution, the expanding middle classes wanted the same kinds of servants and “domestic staff” as the upper classes had. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a butler, a valet, some “staff?” That you didn’t have to worry about?

This is the era of Jeeves & Wooster, and who wouldn’t want a “gentleman’s gentleman” to do the work around the house, make you a hangover cure, drive the car, get you out of scrapes, all while you frittered your time away with idiot friends?

(Of course, I’m sure it’s a total coincidence this is also the period where the Marxists & Socialist thinkers really got going.)

But that stayed asperational, rather than possible, and especially post-World War II, the culture landed on sending women back home and depending on the stay-at-home mom handle “all that.”

There’s a lot of “robot butlers” in mid-century fiction, because how nice would it be if you could just go to the store and buy that robot from The Jetsons, free from any guilt? There’s a lot to unpack there, but that desire for a guilt-free servant class was, and is, persistant in fiction.

Somewhere along the lines, this changes, and robots stop being manual labor or the domestic staff, and start being secretaries, executive assistants. For example, by the time Star Trek: The Next Generation rolls around in the mid-80s, part of the fully automated luxury space communism of the Federation is that the Enterprise computer is basically the perfect secretary—making calls, taking dictation, and doing research. Even by the then it was clear that there was a whole lot of “stuff to know”, and so robots find themselves acting as research assistants. Partly, this is a narrative accelerant—having the Shakespearian actor able to ask thin air for the next plot point helps move things along pretty fast—but the anxiety about information overload was there, even then. Imagine if you could just ask somebody to look it up for you! (Star Trek as a whole is an endless Torment Nexus factory, but that’s a whole other story.)

I’ve been reading a book about the history of keyboards, and one of the more intersting side stories is the way “typing” has interacted with gender roles over the last century. For most of the 1900s, “typing” was a woman’s job, and men, who were of course the bosses, didn’t have time for that sort of tediousness. They’re Idea Guys, and the stuff that sucks is wrestling with an actual typewriter to write them down.

So, they would either handwrite things they needed typed and send it down to the “typing pool”, or dictate to a secretary, who would type it up. Typing becomes a viable job out of the house for younger or unmarried women, albeit one without an actual career path.

This arrangement lasted well into the 80s, and up until then the only men who typed themselves were either writers or nerds. Then computers happened, PCs landed on men’s desks, and it turns out the only thing more powerful than sexism was the desire to cut costs, so men found themselves typing their own emails. (Although, this transition spawns the most unwittingly enlightening quote in the whole book, where someone who was an executive at the time of the transition says it didn’t really matter, because “Feminism ruined everything fun about having a secretary”. pikachu shocked face dot gif)

But we have a pattern; work that would have been done by servants gets handed off to women, and then back to men, and then fiction starts showing up fantasizing about giving that work to a robot, who won’t complain, or have an opinion—or start a union.

Meanwhile, in parallel with all this “chat bots” have been cooking along for as long as there have been computers. Typing at a computer and getting a human-like response was an obvious interface, and spawned a whole set of thought similar but adjacent to all those physical robots. ELIZA emerged almost as soon as computers were able to support such a thing. The Turing test assumes a chat interface. “Software Agents” become a viable area of research. The Infocom text adventure parser came out of the MIT AI lab. What if your secretary was just a page of text on your screen?

One of the ways that thread evolved emerged as LLMs and “Generative AI”. And thanks to the amount of VC being poured in, we get the last couple of years of AI slop. And also a hype cycle that says that any tech company that doesn’t go all-in on “the AI” is going to be left in the dust. It’s the Next Big Thing!

Flash forward to Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference earlier this summer. The Discourse going into WWDC was that Apple was “behind on AI” and needed to catch up to the industry, although does it really count as behind if all your competitors are up over their skis? And so far AI has been extremely unprofitable, and if anything, Apple is a company that only ships products it knows it can make money on.

The result was that they rolled out the most comprehensive vision of how a Gen AI–powered product suite looks here in 2024. In many ways, “Apple Intelligence” was Apple doing what they do best—namely, doing their market research via letting their erstwhile competitors skid into a ditch, and then slide in with a full Second Mover Advantage by saying “so, now do you want something that works?”

They’re very, very good at identifying The Stuff That Sucks, and announcing that they have a solution. So what stuff was it? Writing text, sending pictures, communicating with other people. All done by a faceless, neutral, “assistant,” who you didn’t have to engage with like they were a person, just a fancy piece of software. Computer! Tea, Earl Gray! Hot!

I’m writing about a marketing event from months ago because watching their giant infomercial was where something clicked for me. They spent an hour talking about speed, “look how much faster you can do stuff!” “You don’t have to write your own text, draw your own pictures, send your own emails, interact directly with anyone!”

Left unsaid was what you were saving all that time for. Critically, they didn’t annouce they were going to a 4-day work week or 6-hour days, all this AI was so people could do more “real work”. Except that the “stuff that sucks” was… that work? What’s the vision of what we’ll be doing when we’ve handed off all this stuff that sucks?

Who is building this stuff? What future do they expect to live in, with this bold AI-powered economy? What are we saving all this time for? What future do these people want? Why are these the things they have decided suck?

I was struck, not for the first time, by what a weird dystopia we find ourselves in: “we gutted public education and non-STEM subjects like writing and drawing, and everyone is so overworked they need a secretary but can’t afford one, so here’s a robot!”

To sharpen the point: why in the fuck am I here doing the dishes myself while a bunch of techbros raise billions of dollars to automate the art and poetry? What happened to Threepio up there? Why is this the AI that’s happening?

On Wednesday, we start kicking over rocks to find an answer...