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Metin Pekin is the author of the book Breaking Democracy’s Chains: Freeing and Fortifying Democracy Against Hidden Capture.
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Have a look at Correlation.HeresHow.ie.
Go on, do it now, if you’re listening to this podcast then you have to be near some sort of device that can look at a web page, and it’ll only take a moment. Correlation.HeresHow.ie.
I got bored last Saturday and I put it together, with the help of Claude AI, and I have to say that I think it looks pretty good. In case you haven’t looked at it, its … in case you haven’t looked at it, then really go now and have a look at Correlation.HeresHow.ie … but in case you’re cycling to a job interview, or you have a baby in your arms and a pot boiling over, its some data that I’ve talked about before, the list of countries in the world, and how they rank on various international indices such as the Economist’s Democracy Index, how they rank on GDP per capita, life expectancy and about 30 more and, in particular, how those rankings correlate with each other. Hence Correlation.HeresHow.ie … have I said that enough times yet?
Anyway, like I said, I got bored and I gave Claude AI a prompt to make a website containing all this data, and make an interface with some nice graphics and charts to show it all, and a backend for me to add more data. And I have to say, I’m really impressed with the outcome. I spent about an hour tweaking the design and uploading it to a new subdomain … Correlation.HeresHow.ie.
I then found a bug that meant that the data wasn’t updating properly … except I didn’t find the bug, I noticed the bug. In a previous age I might have gone through a good chunk of the 5,393 lines of code searching for that bug, but instead I described in two sentences of plain English what the bug was, and Claude led me through a series of tests to diagnose and fix it, which after about an hour and a half, worked. Actually the fault was a setting on the hosting platform, not in the code that Claude had produced, but it sorted it out anyway.
I know my way around this stuff, but I’m really not a programmer. My whole point of the website is to rebut the people out there who doubt the value of democracy; it shows very clearly that by almost any measure – GDP, life expectancy, quality of life, literacy and education levels – the quality of democracy in a country powerfully correlates with being at the right end of all those indices. The Peter Thiels of this world who say that a benign dictator can bring progress that would be blocked by the pettifogging of democracy – they are objectively, measurably, provably wrong.
But that’s not what I want to talk about here. What I’m interested in is what effect of being able to throw together a pretty professional-looking website in a couple of hours. I’m not claiming to have come up with the next Google, but there are a lot of people who make, or made, their living doing web development at this level. Only a couple of years ago this could have been a week’s work for a junior developer.
Now, I think that there is an awful lot of uninformed guff being talked about AI. The AI was able to do this so well because fundamentally there is nothing new in this website. There are a billion other websites out there that have a dataset in a database and present that data in tables or graphs on a webpage. That’s nothing new. The genius of AI is to be able to take that idea and apply it to a new dataset, present it in an appealing standardised way, and iron out all the wrinkles. That used to be a skilled job. For some people it still is but not, I suspect, for long.
So to make the interface for Instagram, or theJournal.ie or Daft.ie, up to now, that job was taken by a senior developer, who delegated the basic chunks of it to junior developers, and then a week later checked their work and brought it together. But now it can be knocked out by one person in an hour. I would want a senior developer to do that to make sure that the security was OK, but either way this is a vast reduction in the amount of labour needed.
There is a similar effect likely in some other professions. Lawyers often have to sift through vast amounts of documents. ‘Discovery’ is a process where one side is ordered to provide information to the other to prepare for the case; a common tactic is to snow the opposition under by giving vast amounts of documents, far more than is required, to overwhelm them in the hope that they miss some key points. In a big law firm, the more junior lawyers are often landed with reading stacks of boring documents trying to find a nugget of useful information.
There’s been a whole slew of lawyers getting caught using AI to write their submissions. In one case, hilariously, the judge caught both sides using ChatGPT. This is obviously not a suitable use of the technology, but if you’ve been given 50,000 pages of discovery by the other side, then it makes sense to throw it all at an AI and tell it to summarise the documents and pull out information relevant to the case. That’s an awful lot cheaper than hiring a bunch of even junior lawyers to do it.
Some people will talk about how fears of previous technology eliminating jobs never came true, because people moved up the value chain. We could eliminate unemployment tomorrow by just banning agricultural machinery, and make everybody back into peasant labourers, so they’d work or starve, but that’s not really the goal.
The techno-optimists will talk about AI bringing an age of abundance and leisure, pessimists will talk about the danger of a tiny clique controlling AI and making the rest of us into … peasant labourers, and that’s a whole other debate, and it’s worth debating, but neither of those things are going to happen immediately.
What is happening immediately is that the whole structure of knowledge professions is being upended – programming and law are just two examples – the need for more junior staff is likely to evaporate very, very soon. It’s already happening.
Now, this has its limitations. I could knock out a clone of Instagram, or theJournal.ie or Daft.ie within a couple of hours, but that’s because there is nothing fundamentally original in their interfaces. There’s already plenty of other websites that let you log in and read news or post photos or things for sale. We can laugh at the mistakes of AI sometimes, but in closed data sets, the technology is incredibly powerful.
If you want something completely new – like Google Maps, like Skype, like Shazam, that’s a different story, because they were totally new concepts. I’m sure AI would be good at helping with some of their elements, but the whole project relied on highly creative, experienced senior developers applying their skill to a totally novel end.
Law works in much the same way. But here’s the problem – how do you get to be a senior lawyer or a senior developer? By spending years getting the experience by doing the grunt work. And if nobody is paying anyone to be a junior lawyer or junior programmer, where do we get our future senior lawyers or senior programmers?
That could create the tiny clique of very powerful holding the rest of us to ransom that the pessimists worry about. It’s certainly something we need sort out, and not just get ChatGPT to write the solution.
