We’ve come to the juncture where AI, robotics, Deep Fakes and Covid-19 may have merged. We knew that AI and robots were coming for our jobs. Covid-19 may have moved up the timeline.

For example, Microsoft recently announced that they were “laying off dozens of journalists and editorial workers at its Microsoft News and MSN organizations,” The Verge reported. Given the state of news/the media in the past few years, with Google and Facebook hoovering up advertising dollars and pricier, more seasoned journalists being replaced by far less experienced reporters who were versed in SEO, regurgitated news stories and click bait headlines (pretty much a glorified Buzzfeed, as one commenter noted), replacing them with AI was the logical progression.

This move by Microsoft (and The Guardian, according to the article) might be considered collateral damage from Covid-19, and as we said. might have moved up the timeline on which positions could fairly easily be replaced. Digital Trends (et al) reported on 10 jobs that could be hit hard by the A.I. revolution. Journalism is included, despite what naysayers might have said at the time.

But wait! There’s always more! AI-Generated Text Is the Scariest Deepfake of All, Wired reported. Synthetic video and audio seemed pretty bad. Synthetic writing—ubiquitous and undetectable—will be far worse. “Last month brought the introduction of GPT-3, the next frontier of generative writing: an AI that can produce shockingly human-sounding (if at times surreal) sentences. As its output becomes ever more difficult to distinguish from text produced by humans, one can imagine a future in which the vast majority of the written content we see on the internet is produced by machines. If this were to happen, how would it change the way we react to the content that surrounds us?…When pundits and researchers tried to guess what sort of manipulation campaigns might threaten the 2018 and 2020 elections, misleading AI-generated videos often topped the list.”

Now we have AI generating content – and news, which people are consuming even more veraciously, given the pandemic. We also know that while it’s humans who program AI, it also learns out in the wild and we will remind you that Twitter taught Microsoft’s AI chatbot to be a racist asshole in less than a day. It’s bad enough that censorship, deplatforming, shadow-banning et al are happening on the social media platforms – Twitter, Google and YouTube being the most active offenders, purging anyone whose point of view is not in lockstep with their own, added to the fact that we live in an age where attacking or silencing those who don’t conform to ‘accepted’ points of view has become an acceptable form of discourse, exacerbating the problem. “Pervasive generated text has the potential to warp our social communication ecosystem,” Wired warned. “Synthetic text—particularly of the kind that’s now being produced…will be easy to generate in high volume, and with fewer tells to enable detection… Seeing a lot of people express the same point of view, often at the same time or in the same place, can convince observers that everyone feels a certain way, regardless of whether the people speaking are truly representative—or even real…As the time and effort required to produce commentary drops, it will be possible to produce vast quantities of AI-generated content on any topic imaginable.”

Now it looks like Microsoft’s path to acquiring TikTok has been cleared, thus expanding the company’s social footprint. And possibly enabling them to generate short Deep Fake videos to further monopolize and control the conversation, and to a younger audience.

This is conjecture on our part, but things do not happen in a vacuum in our wonderfully connected world, with social platforms being our information lifeline – especially now.

With Google’s announcement that they will Keep Employees Home Until Summer 2021 Amid Coronavirus Pandemic, we wonder if they’re planning their own AI/employee replacement strategy. We might also look at the recent government handouts of unemployment et al as a test of the Universal Basic Income plan: the government would pay every adult citizen a salary, regardless of wealth, employment income or if they worked at all. As helpful as it might currently be, it has also driven the country much further into debt, and who picks up the tab if this continues ad infinitum? ((Is $600 a Week in Extra Unemployment Aid Deterring People From Seeking Work?) Google has always been a proponent of UBI, as has most of SiliCon Valley, and we’re sure that they’re keeping a close eye on all of this.

Note to self: if GOOG employees can work remotely for over a year, why wouldn’t the company simply ‘hire’ cheaper overseas labor? Ah, the Great Experiment continues.

We’re merely connecting dots here as lines are seemingly being drawn and timelines accelerated. Closer attention must be paid to the advancements and uses of AI at this juncture lest, more and more, in the workplace particularly, we will hear the sounds of human silence as the hour doth draw on apace.  TikTok, TikTok, TikTok.

Onward and forward.