Jaguar Land Rover CEO Adrian Mardell, who has served three years at the helm and 35 years with the automaker, will retire in November-December, yielding to P B Balaji, chief financial officer of JLR owner Tata Motors. Seventeen years after the Tatas took over the iconic British marque, Jaguar will be headed by an Indian. But celebrating reverse imperialism is not cool.
What’s cool is that finally, amid ongoing anxieties about AI, the change of guard provides tangible proof that for better or worse, machines have become smarter than humans. Mardell announced his departure after the epic failure of a ‘woke’ advertising campaign which focused on excessively individualistic human figures amid bright colours, with desperately progressive slogans like ‘copy nothing’ and ‘break moulds’, and without any reference whatsoever to automobiles or luxury. The Jaguar brand lost face and value, like Tesla did after Elon Musk’s political antics.
The humans on Mardell’s watch, including the CEO himself, had failed to appreciate that an auto ad without a car may not be read as an auto ad. But AIs get it right. Here’s the response of Copilot on being asked to look at the images and consider nothing else: “Based solely on the visual elements—ignoring all text and prior knowledge—the advertisement appears to be promoting a fashion or clothing brand.”
This was just one job lost to human frailty. Entrepreneur and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla said last week that AI is becoming so integral to workflows that large-scale corporate restructuring is inevitable, and society will just have to adjust. He predicts that the Fortune 500 list will be upended and that people will lose 80 percent of the current jobs to machines. Perhaps he was talking about tech-heavy industries and we should adjust for the whole human domain? Let us include all workers whose roles rely on manual dexterity, emotional intelligence and other human qualities―farmers, shopkeepers, plumbers, sculptors, dancers, boatmen, cooks, politicians, yoga teachers, pickpockets… Even then, in an industrialised economy, one suspects the toll would not come down drastically.
Tech attrition is already visible. TCS, India’s biggest IT firm, is culling over 12,000 jobs worldwide. It attributes this to restructuring―junking legacy layers of management as workflows and targets change―and dismisses the suspicion that AI has a hand in anything. But as Khosla observes, AI has a hand in everything. Workflows are being reoriented because attitudes to knowledge, ethics, politics, value, language, culture and perhaps even human life are changing rapidly, technology is reorienting to new goals, and AI is available to be embedded into roles in which it performs faster than humans.
The last time the world wished hard to be reborn and new technologies were at hand to make it possible was in the 1960s, when colonialism gave way to a fresh wave of globalisation and the progressive liberal ethic, Cold War polarisation deepened and traditional ideas of nationhood, community and family fell apart amid giant strides in technology and culture like moonshots, plastics, solid state electronics, the pill, political pop music, noir, avant garde cinema, modern media, non-alignment, women’s lib and minority rights. Together, they changed the world.
AI seems to be the secret spice which could forge a new world order out of the current chaos, which it is itself deepening by taking over jobs. Its typical roles entail crunching data into information and information into meta-information―like reading reams of reports and producing a summary. Workers in the lower echelons, who perform functions like writing backgrounders and keeping minutes of meetings, are more likely to be displaced by machines, leaving behind a few experienced workers who stand on thin air. What would happen when they move on, without subordinates trained to step into their shoes?
In consulting, AI integration is changing work processes. The sector has been infamous for sandwiching wads of industry studies between PowerPoint presentations and efficiency sermons, feeding the client this dubious sandwich and running with the money. Now, since the client can make sandwiches with their own AI tools, hand-holding and public education publishing are being highlighted for consultants to remain relevant. McKinsey is trying to lose its ‘suit with PowerPoint’ image and actually work with clients, uses an AI toolkit to remain relevant, and publishes general-access newsletters for outreach and brand recall.
Now, something truly sobering: earlier this summer, Dhruv Agarwal, Mor Naaman and Aditya Vashistha of Cornell University reported finding ‘AI colonialism’―when non-Western writers use predictive text and AI writing assistants, we unwittingly fall into American patterns of expression. Do we restructure our thoughts accordingly? Do we turn to Western idioms, as so much English writing from Asia has done in order to be intelligible to Western audiences?
If AI colonialism is pervasive, it would hasten the ongoing flattening of culture, in which every public place feels impersonal like an airport concourse, transitorily peopled by humans who look and dress the same, and you can’t really talk to anyone because their responses are formulaic―wow, awesome, cool. Will assisted word processing iron out language? Will ‘chalta hai’ give way to ‘we’re good’, or even the newly-minted ‘bigly good’? Really, the maker of that Jaguar ad which said ‘copy nothing’ and ‘break moulds’ didn’t get how standard and uncool everything is becoming.
Pratik Kanjilal | SPEAKEASY | Senior Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, Fletcher School, Tufts University
(Views are personal)
(Tweets @pratik_k)