We have never disrupted our intelligence before.

Are we speeding up our own demise with Artificial Intelligence (AI) or we unlocking a new society based on abundance and higher levels of creativity?

I’ve been thinking about the societal implications of more powerful AI and the rapid pace of its development. When OpenAI released ChatGPT, it was amusing at first, and then quickly became very useful for a wide range of applications. I personally improved my coding skills and sped up the completion time for some small coding projects I was working on. What I wasn’t thinking about at the time was that software developers were being put on notice. I now had access to the skills, for almost free, of a speedy junior developer. But I was like, surely, with the boom in the tech industry and developers commanding big salaries, will have a reasonable amount of time to transition with AI, and employers would find ways of improving productivity without necessarily significant staff cuts. Well, my assumptions were wrong. Almost every other month, since that first GPT model, OpenAI kept building better ones. Then, more AI tools started being developed by other AI start-ups and established companies like Microsoft and Google, and billions continued to pour into AI research. To the point, every industry feels like it is only a matter of time before significant changes will occur, and the substantial revenues they are currently enjoying may disappear, with little to no alternative revenue to shift to. The movie production and gaming development industries come to mind when I saw how a simple prompt could produce cutting-edge visuals, with the capability to fine-tune with a couple more prompts. No big budgets, no VFX team, no actors, no editing team. It will only require the creative movie prompter taking a few weeks to develop a story and fine-tune the creative direction of the movie. Something that currently takes Marvel hundreds of millions and a big team of highly skilled people may take a kid in his room weeks to achieve the same level of production quality. I see the same happening in game development. And if these highly technical, creative, and big-budget industries will be significantly affected, what can we say about the less technically demanding roles?

Recently, IBM laid off about 8,000 staff because of AI and later had to retire around the same number because of AI, funny stuff. They're itching to lay off people at this point; they just have to smell that AI can replace a task. Some Tech companies are boasting about how they plan to cut staff or freeze hiring due to AI. While it improves profit margins now, they are inadvertently initiating a sequence that may erode all the gains from before, plus for the foreseeable future. So, if our intelligence will be replaced by AI, who will be able to afford to buy the things in a society where only a handful of lucky people have jobs? We have to ask ourselves, at what point AI becomes a net negative for Society and if the capitalistic system is the one best suited for the age of AI.

Billions are pumped into AI research, but what about the few billions that are needed to understand and execute the plans of society where AI is replacing labour? Will there be some kind Universal Basic Income (UBI). Will there be closed societies, where some countries decide that they will use AI but up to a certain point, because it is more vital for them to maintain society and understand how to seamlessly transition from one where labour is an essential factor of production to one where it is not? One of the arguments for capitalism is that it fosters and rewards innovation, and I don’t think anyone can disagree with that much. But what happens when Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the one pumping out the bulk of the innovation in a society with increasing unemployment? What will inequality look like in a world with already soaring inequality as it is? Will the owners of intelligence become Kings and everyone else servants? Or will it be a system where everyone has access and is reaping the benefits of low or no-cost solutions to the essential things that we wrestle with today, like high-cost healthcare, housing, college education, food insecurity, etc? Will it be one where there is no 9-to-5 as it is now, but where people have more time for creative endeavors? More time for deepening their relationships and taking care of their overall well-being. That doesn’t sound like capitalism, and I don’t even know what that would be. What will politics look like? Will representatives serve the people, or will AI take over that role too?

#artifical intelligence, #artifical general intelligence, #society, #economics, #future ofwork