Every few days, some news regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI) catches the attention. Either there is some breakthrough in the field or some famous personality has an opinion about it. Perhaps the most commonly discussed aspect of AI is the potential it has to replace human jobs. There are a lot of articles and studies on this, and it goes on to predict the probability that each job sector has of being taken over by AI. The individual people who may lose jobs to AI are in the millions.
The most famous job being taken over is perhaps driving. And with good reason. The technology is almost there and it makes a lot of sense in terms of safety. The desired end result is a world where every car is driven by AI and every unit is connected to each other. When the system knows where every car is and controls them, there will be no accidents and there won’t be the need for traffic lights even. Sounds amazing and very desirable, if you are not an employed driver. Though the self-driving tech is almost there, the idea of interconnected cars is very far away in the future and not without its challenges.
This got me wondering who will be transported to where in these self-driving cars of the future? As millions of jobs are lost, there will be no need for millions of other jobs that support those jobs.
During this COVID pandemic, there are some sectors that are still doing good trade in the short term, like medical supplies, online content, gadgets etc. But every sector will eventually be affected by this pandemic. You realize that every field and sector is interconnected. There may be cases where individual sectors like housing or air travel have taken a bad hit and in some cases, dragged the economy along with it. But the opposite does not happen. In a falling economy, every sector gets hit at different stages of the fall. And no individual sector can bring it back up. Similarly, as AI takes over jobs in sectors one by one, it is going to affect all the sectors, even the ones not being taken over by AI.
In a way, the jobs that are being taken away by AI will soon become obsolete. There will not be a need to move people around because people have nowhere to be. AI enabled robots may replace humans in factories to make products which will no longer be required because there are no humans to use these products or the humans that survive are unable to afford them.
The prediction is that as AI replaces human jobs, humans will have new jobs that arise to facilitate the transition. Humans may be used to train the AI. So what will be the purpose of these new jobs? We all work for our livelihood. But then there is a second purpose. The farmer works to produce food, the doctor works to get people healthier, the teacher works to make better humans, so on and so forth. What will be the purpose of the new jobs? To make sure machines work continuously, to run programs faster, to reduce power consumption of these programs. Jobs will move from supporting humans to supporting machines and programs that support other machines and programs.
Couple of decades from now, one of us waking up from sleep and taking his breakfast pills before putting on his skull mounted communication hub will ask himself, “What the hell am I doing? Why the hell am I doing this?” and continue to plug in the device because he knows why he is doing it. So that he can get that special pill at night that takes him to that special place. Maybe that’s not so bad. If the machines can ensure that all of us get equal physical nourishment and mental stimulation in the safety of our pod, it’s worth a shot.
No comments:
Post a Comment