This Instagrammer deserves your attention and discussion, and not for the reasons you think.

Look closely and you somehow see this uncanny glow on her skin, too glossy, her shirt has this sort of weird uniformness of colour that you'd only see in Ultra HD CGI movies. Her skin has no blemish, literally no blemish. And her hair looks like something you see out of Nvidia's Graphic card performance Demo.

The truth is that Miquela is the creative work of a dozen or so people from a secretive LA based start-up made up of writers, designers who describes their company as a "a transmedia studio that creates digital character driven story worlds". I genuinely mistook her for a real person upon the first few seconds of glances at her feed.

But while it's easy to see that she is a CGI character once you know the context and the story of what she's about, instagram commenters were wild about speculating if she really is in fact human. This was especially true prior to her "coming up front" about her "true identity", when details was scarce.

Why this blew my mind

My immediate reaction upon seeing lilmiquela was an astonishment of the novelty of an idea such as her followed by a deep contemplation of what it means to be an identity online.

It is becoming increasingly true that what is real is no longer what's physical but what is perceived, the phrase "perception is reality" has never been truer in today's society. You can be as socially outgoing as you want, hop all the bars in town. But God forbid you did not prove your escapade with selfie posts of you drinking. You might as well be a hermit because that's what people will think when they look at your empty social media feed.

What followers want

Among her 1.3 million subscribers, there would be 3 types of people;

1. Those who are interested in her story (she has a soap opera worthy story going on right now).
2. Those who follow for the pretty face and fashion sense.
3. Those who are interested with the philosophy and question of a self aware non-human identity in social media.

I am starkly on the 3rd boat. Because for me, this unassuming instagram operation has huge implication on a very interesting debate that, while now seemed trifling, will one day force our future generation to come to terms on matters that will hugely affect their society.

Miquela, although a CG robot, looks and acts exactly like an average instagram influencer. In fact, brands don't even bother as they rush to offer deals to her managers to get their clothing lines digitally worn by her as endorsement.

She's posted pictures of her wearing anything from Supreme clothing line to Prada, you'd know that with 1.3 Million followers, it's not because she "likes" the dresses. Herein lies the issue of the matter. Those endorsement deals could have went to a human Instagram influencer.

Remember earlier that she also took a spot on The Times 25 Most Influential People Award? That spot could also have gone to a human, a person.

We're effectively seeing a robot taking over a creative job in place of a human. Something that we've been assured by expert would not happen very soon. Automation has potentially begun to take over the high paying, highly celebrated jobs of artists, influencers and celebrities now. When what we've thought was that it would only take away minimum wage jobs.

"Robots will take your jobs"

It's high time for us Millennials and GenZ to talk about the eventuality of Robots taking away most of our jobs. We've seen it happen in history, we're seeing it happen now.

I don't expect the baby boomer generation who've gone most of their lives living the greatest economic era of mankind to even understand this problem. They won't live to see the days when automation fully take hold, leaving us as society to either rethink the definition of work or go down a more distopian route of mass unemployment and societal breakdown.

It is fact that robots will sooner take the jobs of high paying highly specific jobs before they take over low paying more general manual jobs. Robots are great with highly specialized jobs (the more specific, the better) that requires human experts but are very poor with general tasks that is normal with minimum wage jobs. A virtual robot has no problem taking over a paralegal's job, filling forms and scouring documents for data, but will have a tough time doing a job of a waiter.

A department that used to be manned by 12 accountants has now been replaced by a turnkey software maintained by 2 software consultants. And very soon, software novelty such as IBM Watson will replace human doctors with 100% accurate diagnostics machine that not only constantly updates itself but the whole network of similarly connected machines with newfound prognosis as it uses machine learning to determine the best way to treat newfound symptoms. Something that human doctors could never do.

Automation and robots won't come for the low paying unskilled labor first. Like Miquela, it's going to take away the most desirable ones, the posh sexy positions people paid hundreds of thousands in education and trainings for.

In the Blockchain context, there are experiments being done now that aims to create a self deciding companies that does away with Management roles, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, DAO for short, will run a company on its own without the micro-managements of any humans.

While experts and authority figures are quick to say robots will take over burger flipping, it's the office jobs that will be replaced long before machines are smart enough to learn the intricacies of general tasks that require human level intuition, like knowing when a burger patty is cooked just right. Robots do a far better job processing gigabytes of spreadsheets than determine the best time to flip a well done piece of meat.

And this argument has extended to something as being a fashion figure, something that has always been thought as a human job.

 

Humans need not apply

I'm taking this quote directly from CGP Grey, who first got me aware and thinking about this issue.

This is not the first time automation has made jobs obsolete. And economist are quick to sooth us with that fact. Saying that new jobs will always emerge to replace the obsolete jobs. But the reason why technologist and futurist make far more pessimistic claims is that this round of job obsolescence caused by robots is nothing like any of the previous revolutions.

As explained by Grey, unlike last time, When jobs do get replaced by the current technological advancement, it will not be like the last Economic Revolution and saying "New jobs will be create to replace the old" is unfounded. There is nothing else we can do when robots can work, think, create, analyse, learn, teach better than humans ever will.

Case in point, Lil Miquela. The US Federal Trade Commision is clear that any instagram influencer must inform of their audience of any paid marketing or advertising partnership with brands. Now, can Lil Miquela be legally called an influencer if she has no legal identity? Unless this legal debacle is resolved, she clearly has an edge compared to the other human influencers who wants to advertise for them. For one thing, brands dont even need to send free samples since it is digitally created with Miquela in the post.

Lil Miquela isn't a burger flipper, yet she has taken a human job. She is the first of her kind, what happens when brands and companies can have a whole host of online avatars that can take pictures anywhere in the world in any settings to choose from? what will happen to influencer job? Imagine if this happens in conjunction with burger flipping robots. What can humans do to earn a salary?

Robots will soon take over mundane jobs, repetitive jobs, analytical jobs, decision making jobs, professional jobs, specialist jobs.. and now, creative jobs.

The future may be dystopian

I am following Lil Miquela closely to observe the ramifications of "creative jobs automation" in real time. At the time of writing, she actually already have 2 "friends" who are all digital identities that exists only in instagram feeds. I won't be surprised when we see 30 of them by the end of next year.

As I said, it may be hard to imagine it now. Most people fall back to the illogical "better technologies will create better jobs for humans" claim just because it's true the last time. Anyone who knows what's happening will tell that this time round, robots can and will take over everything that can do and there might be nothing left for humans to do.