AI is coming for your job in S.F.’s new dystopian game
‘Black Mirror Careers’ allows participants to solve puzzles to help chart future paths
If you’re anxious that artificial intelligence might wipe out your job or take over the world, the antidote could be hiding at the mall right next to the Wetzel’s Pretzels. So maybe lighten up. A company called Immersive Gamebox is offering an interactive group game that turns your dystopian dread into fun. Called “Black Mirror Careers,” the experience lets participants don motion capture hats and caper through an array of wall-projected puzzles that promise to help them figure out their future livelihoods.
The choices aren’t very appealing. In the dark world of the game, which officially opened last month at the Stonestown Galleria in San Francisco, artificial intelligence has taken over every job category save a few, such as guarding the last tree in the Amazon, euthanizing senior citizens, or tending the cryogenic chambers of tech billionaires.
It’s mostly lighthearted antics and doesn’t really have much to do with AI. But it turns out the game players on a recent Thursday
had plenty of thoughts about what the software could mean for their own lives and jobs in the real world.
Two pharmacy workers saw the potential for AI to speed up their work but not put them on the breadline anytime soon. Two girls felt they were still too young to use chatbots. Their professor father thought it was all pretty great. None was buying the doomsday hand-wringing that has amped up since OpenAI launched its flagship ChatGPT chatbot in 2022.
So while governments and even individual classrooms are grappling with how and whether to use programs like ChatGPT,
people are making up their own minds.
Take Nate Quinn, a philosophy professor who was there to play the game with his daughters, Cana and Jessie. Tall, smiling boisterously as his shaggy hair streamed from under a trucker’s hat, he is the dean of undergraduate studies at Golden Gate University in San Francisco and chairs the psychology department.
Quinn said AI raises all sorts of questions about the nature of consciousness and selfhood, especially in the context of Buddhism, which he has studied. Buddhist teachings tend to deemphasize the existence of a separate self.
“Programs like ChatGPT understand the process of language,” Quinn said, even if they can’t yet really think for themselves. “So do they have a self ? Do any of us?”
He stood in a dimly lit hallway, overhung by bars of neon light before entering one of the glassed-in game rooms with its flashing displays and Blade Runner aesthetic.
Thinking bot or not, Quinn said, AI “brings up basic notions of identity and what it means to human.”
In the mall just outside, Target shoppers strolled past the game venue, seemingly oblivious to its gloomy signage about the end of life as we know it.
Wetzel’s Pretzels also seemed to be doing a brisk business.
Other players, like Sau Yeung, knitted their brows and considered how the technology might mess with their current jobs.
Yeung, a pharmacy analyst, said his work concerns quality control, such as investigating how or why an incorrect drug was prescribed.
AI could make it easier to parse the data on such outcomes, he said. But shortly before donning his motion capture tiara, Yeung said he wasn’t too worried about being forced to work anytime soon as a human pet for advanced AI robots — one of the game’s nicer future career paths.
Turns out that a lot of people in the U.S. aren’t quite as sanguine about artificial intelligence.
A Pew Research Center survey from November showed 52% of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI in their daily lives. A little more than a third expressed a mixture of excitement and concern, while about 10% said they felt more excitement than concern.
Yeung’s high-quality play inside the box made his future in the AI-ravaged world seem assured. He stutter-stepped and shifted his body to manipulate a rolling ball through a puzzle projected on the wall. Deftly wobbling his motion-capture headpiece to and fro, his aptitude to work under the delivery robots of the future appeared high.
On the other hand, his friend Kyle Wong, a pharmacy technician, had some trouble using body movements to trace out routes for the delivery drones of the future.
Perhaps he’d be better suited to another one of the awful jobs posted on the front of the Immersive Gamebox that will be left over for us meat puppets in the future, such as being an officer with the university campus thought police or a talent scout for OnlyFans.
Wong shrugged after completing the battery of tests, saying he didn’t really get the connection to the whole AI thing. “It’s a good workout,” he said, panting slightly.
In any case, his pharmacy job entails plenty of in-person interaction that would be tough to replace with AI-powered automation, he said.
Beyond raising questions about the nature of selfhood, Quinn, the professor, said he does use AI at work.
That includes training a miniature version of an OpenAI chatbot, called a GPT, by feeding it reams of his own writing on philosophy and mediation. The idea, he said, is to better understand, organize and interrogate his own thinking.
“I ask it, ‘What would Nate say? ’” Quinn said.
His daughters, patiently clutching their 1-year-old dog, Bianca, both attend Waldorf schools, which allow very limited technology in school — an approach their father said he approves of.
Neither has ever used ChatGPT. Maybe when they get a bit older, they said.