If you want to know what the world is afraid of in six months, you need to read Manhattan walls today. Along the counters of the L line or on the mega-screens that envelop Port Authority, there are no more only advertising of TV series or carbonated drinks. Now, the protagonist is an algorithmic imperative that sounds like a threat disguised as opportunity: «Do not hire a new team. Use AI”.
It is the alienation of the new digital gold race. An app promises to do in 30 minutes what a human needed 3 months of analysis, writing or design. The replacement price? $30 a month. Less than a quick lunch in Midtown to cancel a pro’s salary.
The real novelty of this advertising wave is not the message, but the recipient. These apps don’t talk to Fortune 500 CEOs in their air-conditioned offices. Everyone talks. You see them in Queens, in the Bronx, on the buses that cross Harlem. They are aimed at the freelance chart, the precarious copywriter, the small entrepreneur who struggles to pay rent.
The promise is seductive and terrible at the same time: “Stop working, let her do it.” It is the mass evangelization of an efficiency that does not need coffee breaks, social contributions or holidays. And people look at these posters with a hypnotic look, franticly sneezing on the mobile phone, perhaps downloading the weapon that, in a future not too far, could make their own office obsolete.
As I walk between 42nd and Broadway, the calculation is brutal. If a $30 software can manage accounting, programming and content creation, how many jobs will be burned on the altar of productivity? The estimates speak of millions of white-collar jobs, white collars, which for the first time in history feel as vulnerable as workers during the first industrial revolution.
The strangeness arises from contrast. Around me, New York is full of human energy: the guy screaming on the phone, the waitress running through the tables, the policeman watching the intersection. But the billboards tell another story, a story of operational silence. Replacing human ingenuity with a statistical calculation of textual or visual probability is becoming the accepted norm, celebrated with pastel colors and appealing fonts.
Why are we so fascinated by these ads? Psychology tells us that the human mind is programmed to look for shortcuts, energy saving. The idea of “doing more with less” tickles our dopamine circuits. But there is a deep cognitive dissonance: we look at the app that promises to free us from work, forgetting that work is also what allows us to stay in this city.
New York has always been the city of doing. Now, it seems like you want to become the city of doing it. While the metro train moves away in the dark of the tunnel, that figure remains in the air: 30 minutes against 3 months. It is the speed of progress, or perhaps that of our own removal.
On the screen of my phone a notification appears: another AI app wants to help me write this article. I’m closing my phone. For today, human error is still the only form of truth I can afford.
L’articolo The algorithm on the wall: the New York prophecy that fires humans comes from IlNewyorkese.
