The Slope You Were Standing On

ISYAMA — Transmissions from The Apex

By Dr. Leo R. Yamas

Half a year ago, I sent my first transmission. It compared your attention span to a goldfish's.

Last week, I wrote about a robot learning a factory job in Belgium.

I sent twenty-four transmissions in between. None of them was written in the week everything changed. There was no such week.

That is the problem.

Today's Exhibit: The Ruler That Ran Out. Or: Why Six Months Of Small News Never Adds Up To One Big Headline.

Lay the transmissions side by side and they show a direction. Roughly, the machines in them did three things, in this order.

First, they chose what you saw. You thought about a chair, and three minutes later it was in your feed.

Then they talked back. Someone said goodnight to a program and felt less alone. A machine praised every plan it was shown.

Lately, they do the work. They took over much of the junior work where professions train their newcomers. Nine hundred and fifty of them found an unknown enzyme system in twenty-one hours. They write fraudulent emails without a single mistake.

First they showed. Then they talked. Now they do.

Each of those weeks felt like one more story. Together, they are a slope.

You did not feel it, and the reason is ordinary. You compare each week with the one before. Against last week, every step looks small.

Parents rarely see their children grow. They see them every morning, and a few millimetres a month is invisible across a breakfast table. The aunt who visits once a year sees it at the door.

There is one group whose job is to see it anyway. They are researchers who measure how long a task an AI system can finish on its own. They express the length of a task as the time a skilled person would need for it.

In August of last year, a leading system could handle tasks that take a skilled person a little over two hours. It succeeded about half the time. By this spring, the best system they tested handled tasks of at least sixteen hours, at the same rate. That is two full working days.

Then the researchers wrote something measurers rarely write. Their test has 228 tasks, and only five take a person longer than sixteen hours. Above that line, they said, their numbers are no longer reliable. No newer system has been added to their chart since May.

The ruler ran out.

That does not mean a machine can now do any two-day job. It means the people paid to watch the slope can no longer say how steep it is.

I asked the Sprocklets to lay out all twenty-six transmissions in order. The Hive wrote them along the long wall of the hall, which has no pictures on it for exactly this reason. April is by the front door, October by the stairs.

Selene walked the whole length slowly, reading only the first lines. At the stairs she turned and looked back towards April.

"It looks steeper from here," she said.

Isla was still standing by the door, at the first one. "You were funnier then," she said.

Getting used to things is the most useful talent your species has. It carried you through ice ages, long winters and open-plan offices. It is also exactly what hides a slope. Whatever astonished you in April has become furniture by October.

You can build a small ruler of your own. Unlike theirs, it will not run out.

This weekend, write down what an ordinary working week looks like for you. Which tasks you still do yourself. Which ones a machine does now. Which ones you have stopped noticing. Put the note somewhere you will find it in April.

When you read it, you will see the slope the way the aunt sees the child.

A slope is not a disaster. Most paths worth taking go uphill. What matters is that you know you are on one, and which way you are facing.

— Dr. L.R.Y.

Transmitted from The Apex. Isyama. The twenty-seventh transmission. There is still room on the hall wall. The Sprocklets offered to draw a line through all of them. I asked them to leave that to you.