Jon Stewart sounds the alarm about AI – ‘We’re aiding and abetting our own destruction’

Last week, the former host of The daily show for over a decade and the current part-time moderator stopped The City with Matthew Belloni, a podcast from The Ringer. Not unlike a late-night Paul Revere revival, Stewart warned listeners of how swift and potentially damaging an AI invasion could be.

“It’s coming for everybody and it’s going to destroy the workforce in a way we haven’t seen,” he told Belloni, comparing it to the Industrial Revolution in terms of changing the course of history. And unlike other historical periods of economic change, it predicts the AI ​​revolution to happen in the blink of an eye.

“He’s going to do that in a week when he finally comes online,” Stewart said. He described it as a rapid version of the level of destruction that the automobile and industrial revolutions had on blue-collar work.

Discussing how AI has been trained for human work to be a more efficient version of what humans do, Stewart noted, “We are aiding and abetting our own destruction; no sense.”

He added that the public is likely to see only a basic version of what Silicon Valley has to offer, and that fully realized confidential releases of their products are probably “capable of replacing 70% of the workforce.”

Calls for AI regulation have grown louder recently, playing out mostly on the Hollywood stage at the moment, but a storm is brewing. Creators in the music industry, as well as the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) have railed against the unmitigated use of AI as potentially harmful to the arts in general and to their jobs. Executives could contract out their work amid fights for fair wages. Only the first wave of many is possible, according to Stewart. And it’s not just aimed at small fish, he warned. The sharks that become close to Silicon Valley are likely to be threatened eventually as well.

“If you don’t think it’s coming for the devs and everybody else, you’d be wrong, bro,” Stewart warned.

Last February, Tyler Perry said he was putting multimillion-dollar plans to expand his studio on hold after seeing OpenAI’s Sora video generation technology. Airing his concerns about lost jobs, Perry said that at the rate technology is moving, it feels like “everyone in the industry is running a hundred miles an hour to try and catch up, try and placed railing”. By pushing for government involvement, Perry predicted that AI will change other industries as well.

“AI will not replace you, the person who can use artificial intelligence will replace you” and such phrases have become more and more common among CEOs and wealthy entrepreneurs. But that’s not really the whole truth, Stewart claimed. “What they’re saying to their shareholders is, ‘This is going to be a way to increase productivity without the workload,'” he said. The real question about AI “is how … we use it as a tool without returning to the factory”, he continued.

This isn’t the first time Stewart has raised red flags about our steamy path to an AI world. “We’ve been through technological advances before, and they’ve all promised a utopian life without fatigue,” Stewart said in The daily show this April. “But the reality is that they come for our jobs.”

He warned that Silicon Valley will have to learn how to push back disruptions if it is to avoid this man-made AI revolution. In that sense, an AI Big Bang “isn’t inevitable. But unfortunately it’s going to take a long time to get it back in the bag,” he said.

Of course, the government also has a hand in this, albeit slowly. As Stewart put it: “This is the most digital problem being handled by the most preemptive analog system.” He called the kids who grow up in politics asking OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for help.

He recalled how figures in government welcomed social media with open arms and now drag leaders to try to hold them accountable for the damage they have caused. “Now, how many times do those guys get called before Congress saying, ‘You’re making all our girls sad,'” he said. “Everybody’s Urkel when it comes to all this s**t,” he said, referring to the very late slogan: “Did I do it?”