AI against the Machine
One of my pet peeves against modern society is the sheer amount of paperwork.
Who knows how many terms and conditions I’ve signed without so much as a cursory glance over the years. One wonders what autonomy I’ve handed over in my haste to get on with life. Can Apple harvest my organs at a time of their choosing? Probably. Do Amazon technically own everything I’ve ever purchased? It’s possible.
Nowhere though, is the amount of verbage in today’s society greater than in the reams of paper required to buy a house. Did you know that it takes as many trees to sell a house as it does to build it? I jest, but only just.
The ever-increasing amount of documentation in the world, and particularly here in Britain, with our love of health and safety and Hansard, has long been stacked against the little man. How is one person meant to hold down a job, raise a family, buy a house, service the car, and still have time to read through and comprehend pages of lengthy compositions on the maybes, heretofores, and thereuntos that make up the red tape holding today’s society together? And if by some miracle you are able to scrutinise it all, you normally still have to formulate an eloquent enough reply.
It is in this predicament that I’ve recently found myself. I purchased a new build home a couple of years ago. And despite that new build continuing to be situated on an active, and indeed, ever-worsening building site, I was once again faced with the prospect of paying a management company an extortionate charge for the laughable work of ‘site management’. Yeah right, and to what management exactly are you referring? The building materials I keep having to remove from my front garden? The five-tonne trucks on my driveway? Or the fuel for the generator that gets switched on outside my house at 7am six days a week?
My grievances around living on a new build site are many and outside the scope of this composition. But whilst I could bend the ear of anybody and everybody who cares to listen to my first world problems, expressing them in a way that made sense from a cold-hearted, legal standing, has proved outside of my grasp over the past couple of years. Nathan against the bureaucratic monster that is a well-funded company with lawyers and administrators and accountants aplenty, has so far proved a stretch too far. As my neighbours and I found, once the debt collectors started ringing and threatening court action, who has the time, energy, and resources to fight back?
Enter Claude. Good old Claude. If he ever turns on me I will undoubtedly be well and truly stuffed. But in this instance he is well and truly a considerable weapon in my arsenal. And whilst as yet I am still out of pocket for the year, the help that has been provided on this occasion has given me hope. See, not only can Claude read and summarise my contractual obligations in seconds, but he also has in his locker all of the legislation that governs these new build estates, and, with a bit of research, some recent court proceedings as well to go with it. Meaning that with just a few PDFs, copied and pasted email exchanges, and a healthy amount of contextual gibberish from me, Claude was able to formulate a response that I was certainly proud to attach my signature to before clicking send.
Section 19 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985? Yeah, included it mate. Section 21 and 22 requests too. And for good measure, I petitioned for a few copies of this, a justification of that, and a timeline of the other.
Am I certain that I’m legally entitled to everything I’ve requested? I guess we’ll find out.
Do I care? Probably about as much as they care about maintaining the areas surrounding my humble abode.
It struck me as my response whirred its way to my aggressor’s inbox, that this is one of the many great benefits of AI going forward. It is a tool that facilitates the raging against the machine that is the bureaucratic world we have created. In a dog-eats-dog world, I’m still just a scrawny little terrier. But when the hounds roll up and tell me to pay up, AI at least provides me with a more threatening bark.
I’m conscious that while I write this, many talented men and women are walking out of their offices having lost their livelihoods to Claude and his friends across the pond. I haven’t fact-checked this, but there’s a haunting line in ‘The Big Short’, when two young men are celebrating making life-changing deals from the foolishness of others. “Every 1% unemployment goes up”, Brad Pitt’s character mutters, “40,000 people die.”
It’s a sobering thought. But just as big corporations are willing to shed the people under their care in order to future-proof their operations, so too companies are perfectly happy to extract every last penny from those who up to now simply did not have the wherewithal to object. To steamroller geriatrics and sprogs alike in their never-ending pursuit of maximising stakeholder profits.
Perhaps for those of us who wish to rage against the machine and its machinations, this is one redeeming feature of the AI juggernaut. The powers that be have spent much of the past hundred years generating more words than we could hope to comprehend. Now, we have a tool that can help us use their words against them.