The D&D Theory of Automation

When exactly is AI going to take your job? One year? Two years? Twenty? Can you last until retirement? As Yogi Berra said, "Predictions are hard, especially about the future." It depends on who you are, what your job is, and how good you are at it. I'm describing here a conceptual model I have for these questions to understand how easy it is to build a machine to do a man's job. It starts with Dungeons and Dragons.

Pen-and-paper role-playing games are unique in the level of freedom allowed to players. The little car in Monopoly can only explore the streets laid out on the Monopoly board. In an RPG the player can always ask the game master, "Can I do this instead?" This leaves the game master with a problem to solve: "Well, can he?"

Take an example from an epic of the past. Beowulf is wrestling with Grendel. Is Beowulf strong enough to tear off Grendel's arm? In the saga the skald can declare yes, he was. In a game it's more interesting if there's a chance to fail. These games answer that question by providing the player with certain attributes, and checking whether they're strong enough with dice. The details of how this works are not at all important to this question, but the attributes are. With your permission, I'll run down the six numbers that define every D&D character. This will be old hat for some; feel free to skip ahead. For the rest, this won't require you knowing any more about nerd stuff than you need to.

Strength: How big, beefy, and brawny you are. A high strength lets you bench press a few reps of a really heavy weight. In the climactic confrontation in the Odyssey, when Penelope declares that she'll wed the suitor who can string her lost husband's bow, only Odysseus is able to string the bow because only Odysseus made his strength check.

Dexterity: How nimble or agile you are. Dexterity governs your ability with lockpicks. When Robin Hood splits his opponent's arrow, it's because he's got a really high dexterity score.

Constitution: Your toughness or endurance. Your ability to bench press a lower amount of weight many times. The messenger who delivered the news of the Battle of Marathon made his constitution check to run that distance, but (according to legend) failed the check to survive doing so.

Intelligence: How smart, how clever you are. If you needed to remember an arcane fact or break a code, this would be the attribute you roll against. Bilbo under the Misty Mountains used his intelligence to guess Gollum's riddles.

Wisdom: How understanding you are. Your judgment. Wisdom is perhaps the least well-defined attribute. Charon, the centaur skilled in the arts of healing, had a high wisdom score.

Charisma: How likable, friendly, or inspiring you are. You'd use charisma to enthrall your audience with a story or con a mark. Orpheus, whose music was so beautiful that even wild animals would stop to listen, had charisma coming out of his ears.

Here's the key insight: imagine that reality is filled with these same attribute checks. Every bit of automation exists to replace your roll. I might not be able to solve a given math problem, but Wolfram Alpha can. Instead of rolling against my intelligence, I can automate the problem. With that in mind let's talk about automation generally.

Way back in the Paleolithic we started to build tools. Caveman want fire. Caveman can tear down tree with bare hands. Caveman tear down tree easier with fist axe. Fist axe provides a bonus to his strength check.

Beasts of burden, the wheel; these sorts of things exist to obviate the need for strength and constitution checks. I could carry a sack of grain five miles (in theory.) Or I could set it on a wagon and pull the wagon. Or I could get an ox to pull the wagon for me. If I were running a role-playing game and a player were coming to me with these various solutions, I'd make his roll easier or harder depending on which he chose.

Until the Industrial Revolution technology mostly removed strength and constitution checks. Then our machines got better and better at replacing dexterity. Ludd wasn't destroying weaving machines because they were too strong for him. (This is not to discount the strength-providing aspects of the steam engine; John Henry pitted strength and endurance against the machine.) You can see where this is headed, but half the attributes are still untouched.

Is it possible to automate charisma? Sure, depending on what you're talking about. Thomas Edison's phonograph suddenly made a lot of charisma checks obsolete. Tavern songs used to be a thing. I've never been in a bar where people are singing, but I've been in plenty with blaring jukeboxes.

The computer, in all its various forms from ENIAC to modern AI, exists to replace intelligence checks. Need to solve a math problem? Use a calculator. Accounting, research, chess; all of these things have gotten far easier because we've devised machines to do intelligence checks for you.

Today's worries about AI come from another advance in machine automation. If you want to write a blog post, you can either roll against your intelligence or use ChatGPT. Paint a picture? Roll charisma or ask OpenAI. Suddenly whole classes of jobs that used to be the sole provenance of humans are threatened by cheap computer substitutes. If you can automate a solution to my strength checks, and my constitution checks, and you've got the dexterity thing sorted out, and now you can replace my intelligence and charism, what do I have left? What room does that leave for us poor, squishy humans? Perhaps you've noticed that I left one attribute out.

Wisdom. I can use a wagon to move grain to market, but the wagon doesn't tell me which market. I can use a sophisticated algorithm to make stock trades, but it doesn't tell me if I'll be happier with more money or not. I can use a weed whacker to trim my grass, but that gives me no information at all as to how good my garden will look afterward.

You can use a machine to do a great many things, more now than ever before. You can't use a machine to replace the wisdom that tells you whether or not you should do those things. Oh, you can build a decision algorithm to choose markets or plot a garden. You could also flip a coin. That doesn't mean your machine is making the right choice. Wisdom can't be automated currently, and I believe it never will be.

If you've ever seen an AI-generated piece of art and shuddered at those dead eyes, that's why. If you've ever read an AI-generated story and called it good enough but not great, that's why. If you've ever worried about losing your job to a computer, this is your opportunity. And if you've ever worried about wasting your life on games, it's possible to learn something from them, too.

If you haven't been min-maxxing your Wisdom score, I suggest you start now.