AI or People… who should we fear more?
In less than a decade Artificial Intelligence (AI) will deliver the world over $13 Trillion of productivity gain a year; slightly less than the GDP of China produced by 1.4 Billion people working in a year! An economic impact with real-life implications. There is an expected consequence of massive job elimination and social after-effects. An upshot that triggers a fear of us becoming the slaves and the machines the masters.
But the fear of AI and its consequences is misplaced. The real threat is not the machines, but us and our decisions on how we embrace technology. A choice that is lost in the hoopla of making AI the villain. The danger is for people to get lost in virtual, Metaverse like, universes and become separated from the reality or life. The risk is in losing our cognitive reasoning and ability to distinguish between right and wrong by naively being funneled into communities of similar thoughts that are never challenged and evolved.
Due to the invention of AI-generated art, or restaurant waitering now under the threat by robot waiters, many futurist experts believe mankind is now entering an era that will be dominated by AI, and humans will have no role to play in it. Accountants, pilots, truck and bus drivers, customer support agents, and even musicians will lose their jobs. Some estimates call for about 800 million jobs displaced and close to 400,000 million eliminated by 2030.
On the flip side, in 2020 the World Economic Forum (WEF) estimated that by the year 2025, 85 million people would lose their jobs as a result of AI, but an additional 97 million jobs would be created due to the improvements driven by it. It seems that the claims of social upheaval and job loss are not materializing!
Looking back, nobody remembers the NY workers whose job of cleaning horse manure was at danger. The invention of Cars and Electricity created a new world for mankind where technological advancements have become commonplace. Electricity provided the infrastructure for the development of computers, which later resulted in the invention of the smartphone, which led to a plethora of jobs like application development. The invention of cars gave birth to a massive supply chain system that is now spread around the world and employs millions.
The AI revolution will be very much the same as the previous technological advancements throughout history. Certain job roles will fall away, only to lead to the creation of new ones. In the manufacturing sector, we are seeing production lines become more efficient which in turn facilitates business growth and by that token, new jobs. Jobs that require different sets of skills and mindsets. Jobs that replace hard manual work with those requiring more creativity.
The emergence of self-driving cars and planes could ultimately eliminate the need for drivers and pilots, but along with the development of autonomous vehicles, is the infrastructure being created to facilitate this technology. As a result, we are seeing the emergence of new professions in this sector such as fleet management, Smart cities, charging stations, vehicle maintenance, customer experience, remote operations and so much more.
In my opinion, we should not fear AI but the people who take a different personality in the virtual (Metaverse) world and slowly are becoming detached from reality. Those, who take on fake identities, establish misrepresented friendships and seek success and progress by being someone else with a different character and capabilities than in real life. What is problematic and scary is how we are teaching our next generation to learn to lie and live in a pretend world where just like online games everyone can push the button and start the game over without consequence. Kids are born and educated in the real world, real money has to be earned to feed those kids and provide shelter, guns and bullets kill and there are no magic second-life pills that can be purchased for a few imaginary tokens.
Also, what is scary is how our understanding of issues is turned into myopic and one-dimensional as AI algorithms put us in one lane or another. AI machines limit our knowledge by forcing us to see more of what we liked before or what our friends found worthy. A vicious cycle of confirmation bias that leads to ignorance and elimination of choice. A profit motive that is satisfied through our continuous engagement with social media platforms by being reconfirmed that our opinion is everyone’s opinion — that we are always right. A process that slowly takes away our ability to provide the essential context and duality that drives the discovery of knowledge and compromises our fundamental cognitive capabilities that makes us a superior species. Likely a permanent polarity that can be passed to the next generation as our boxed perspectives become absolutes over time and through repetition.
Perhaps, with our choices, we are asking the machine to take over with a more balanced, logical, and realistic perspective. Perhaps we are setting up the machines to rule the world as we choose to limit our thirst for knowledge and truth by being addicted to viewing the world from a comfortable window of confirmation.
