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Behold the decade of mid tech!
That is what I want to say every time someone asks me, “What about A.I.?” with the breathless anticipation of a boy who thinks this is the summer he finally gets to touch a boob. I’m far from a Luddite. It is precisely because I use new technology that I know mid when I see it.
Academics are rarely good stand-ins for typical workers. But the mid technology revolution is an exception. It has come for us first. Some of it has even come from us, genuinely exciting academic inventions and research science that could positively contribute to society. But what we’ve already seen in academia is that the use cases for artificial intelligence across every domain of work and life have started to get silly really fast. Most of us aren’t using A.I. to save lives faster and better. We are using A.I. to make mediocre improvements, such as emailing more. Even the most enthusiastic papers about A.I.’s power to augment white-collar work have struggled to come up with something more exciting than “A brief that once took two days to write will now take two hours!”
Mid tech’s best innovation is a threat.
A.I. is one of many technologies that promise transformation through iteration rather than disruption. Consumer automation once promised seamless checkout experiences that empowered customers to bag our own groceries. It turns out that checkout automation is pretty mid — cashiers are still better at managing points of sale. A.I.-based facial recognition similarly promised a smoother, faster way to verify who you are at places like the airport. But the T.S.A.’s adoption of the technology (complete with unresolved privacy concerns) hasn’t particularly revolutionized the airport experience or made security screening lines shorter. I’ll just say, it all feels pretty mid to me.
The economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo call these kinds of technological fizzles “so-so” technologies. They change some jobs. They’re kind of nifty for a while. Eventually they become background noise or are flat-out annoying, say, when you’re bagging two weeks’ worth of your own groceries.
Artificial intelligence is supposedly more radical than automation. Tech billionaires promise us that workers who can’t or won’t use A.I. will be left behind. Politicians promise to make policy that unleashes the power of A.I. to do … something, though many of them aren’t exactly sure what. Consumers who fancy themselves early adopters get a lot of mileage out of A.I.’s predictive power, but they accept a lot of bugginess and poor performance to live in the future before everyone else.
The rest of us are using this technology for far more mundane purposes. A.I. spits out meal plans with the right amount of macros, tells us when our calendars are overscheduled and helps write emails that no one wants. That’s a mid revolution of mid tasks.