Don’t get mad, get even!

Or how to robot-proof your career

There used to be a time when the rich world was complaining of jobs being Shanghai-ed or Bangalore-d away. It appears now that humans, all and sundry, are at the risk of being robot-ed away.

Trending on my news feeds over the past few months are articles from a set of highbrow publications that pronounced that the liberal arts were the only resort for future humans. Trounced by AI in traditional fields of inquiry that are vulnerable to robotisation, jobs in STEM, Finance and the like were most at risk, they warned. This being so, it was argued, humans could make use of their skills in the humanities that require fuzzier forms of expertise that cannot be usurped by the coming machine onslaught. Fields such as art, poetry and music.

Fresh from reading this, and spouting my newfound anti-STEM wisdom to anyone within earshot, imagine my consternation when I discovered that the latest field to be invaded by the bots was (gasp!) poetry.  

Can there be such a thing as artificial poetry? Apparently, yes- the one in question has been written by a chatbot who has been 'learning' through interactions with people!   Naturally, this development sparked a generous amount of outrage across literary circles, apart from chilling my poetic aspirations to the bone.

A friend took one look at one of the creations of Xiaoice, a chatbot on Weibo, and reassured me that I have nothing to worry about. The offending sample reads thus:

The rain is blowing through the sea/ A bird in the sky/ A night of light and calm/ Sunlight/ Now in the sky/ Cool heart/ The savage north wind/ When I found a new world.

Not so fast. I decided to ambush my Modern poetry discussion group with this piece, passing it off as a poem by a contemporary American author who chose to remain anonymous. For a few minutes after I read it out, there was silence as the group digested the piece. Soon after, a storm of observations broke out.

"The savage north wind- what a refreshingly original thought. Surely, an oblique reference to the more traditional east wind."

"Oh, pure genius. The north wind that blows a new life, so unlike the east wind.”

"The sharp shift from the calm night to sunlight- a volte-face that brought about the discovery of the new world?"

"What an interesting thought!"

By now, I had slipped away, new hope nestling in my heart. If Xiaoice, an infant in chatbot years, could pique such ardent poetic discussions, maybe I could spin out a few quick quatrains too. Maybe I would just let the universe suggest words to me and arrange it into lines. After all, those who are keen to find meaning in lines will do so, regardless of how subtly (or grossly) it is hidden!