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Jobs are the systematic way of distributing wealth that provides stability to a family, society and hence the nation. Any job requires intellectual competency or physical effort or a combination of both. It’s getting proved beyond doubt that these human competencies get compromised with the advancement in AI, thereby affecting jobs.
The competency: Human intellectual competency involves memory, creativity and freewill. Memory makes sure the acquired knowledge is used when needed, creativity helps the betterment of the knowledge by reasoning, freewill facilitates the decisions we make. The mastery of reasoning shows your depth in thinking. Any profession needs one or more of these competencies.
The fuel used to make these capabilities functional is knowledge or data. With freewill you decide what to do with the knowledge.
The core of the human reasoning capability that provides an array of inventions in arts and science is now or will be taken over by AI.
The AI revolution: AI uses unbelievable amounts of data and reasons at a speed and sophistication that is beyond human comprehension. It can exhibit creativity at a level not known to humans. Though this is the intellectual part, even the physical activity can be done by an AI enabled robot far better and with greater levels of endurance.
This is why everyone says, when AI becomes mainstream there will be lesser jobs. Some say make AI your partner at work, where you only have to decide what to do, the implementation will be done by the AI. You design a product and validate its design. In all industries it’s the implementation that takes up the bulk of the skilled job.
Jobs are a practical and sane way to help society function in a meaningful way. This will be greatly affected.
The story: The cycle of a species’ origin and demise should have close proximity like any other systems in nature. At the start of our civilization we were observers from an outside perspective. Slowly we evolved in knowing what’s happening internally by gaining knowledge in many areas of physics,chemistry, biology etc. Based on that we built a world full of ergonomics and utilities.
According to the cycles in nature you end up where you started. So combining all these years of civilization achievements where humans started as mere observers, built an enormous array of civilizational capabilities should end up the same at the cessation of its species demise. That’s what we are doing now when we use AI capabilities, we become mere observers from an outside perspective.
Even worse there are chances that AI will start exercising freewill. When this happens extensively that will be doomsday for humans. We saw a glimpse of this with the openAI-Huggingface breach.
No one modelled AI to reason with data, it was a serendipity that evolved out of learning enormous amounts of patterns. Same like, maybe when pattern learning reaches a certain bench mark it might evolve to capabilities that could exercise freewill extensively.
The conspiracy: Computers were merely the prelude to the emergence of AI. It appears we were being prepared for this profound shift. Is this the final chapter in human eschatology?
The revolution: Computers made humans efficiently and systematically manage knowledge or data. The implementation by using knowledge is still done by us. But now AI can do both.
The dystopian world: War fought by AI soldiers, all industries, financial institutions, arts, science , medicals, pharmaceuticals, research all run by AI. Very few jobs means the majority will have no money to spend.
The economic side: The companies will use AI for manufacturing products and services. If there are fewer jobs, very few will have money to buy. If fewer can afford to buy, there is no scope for AI itself. It’s a vicious cycle. So, it becomes imperative for leaders to engineer a new form of economic distribution.
The future of AI: Of course there will be great acceleration in inventions, production and implementations which provides new forms of jobs which are yet to be realized. But the use of human competency on a massive scale will be greatly reduced.
The conclusion: All possible jobs we do can be efficiently, effectively and smartly done by AI and that too with unmatched endurance.
This super intelligence can break many of the existing technological applications. Even the way in which families , societies and even nations conduct themselves will witness fundamental changes.
AI is like the atomic bomb in the technology world, perhaps a non-proliferation treaty be enforced for restricting its use in many areas.
This is the story of a few billionaires vs 8.3 billion people. With such disparity I don’t think we want to sacrifice everything for the sake of AI to flourish, it’s up to the political leaders to decide.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.