For most of human history, labor was manual. Only in the past half-century did it become the norm (at least, in developed nations) for people to work indoors in office buildings on a computer.
Now with the advent of AI, though, the only jobs that are truly safe are those that require manual human work. You can’t get your plumbing fixed without a human plumber coming by to do it manually for you.
So in a certain step, we’re going backwards. We started out with manual labor, shifted to white-collar work on computers, and now are headed back towards manual. But the massive efficiency that AI provides in all the other realms will make its benefit overall more than worth it.
Just cuz that’s not a thing yet doesn’t mean it’s not possible.
Just off the top of my head, I could see future housing being built with smart plumbing that’s hooked up to a little robot, that tootles around doing maintenance - thus reducing/delaying problems in the first place - and performing minor repairs on the spot.
… and that’s off the cuff at 3 a.m. after a long night at work by someone with next-to-negligible plumbing experience.
Out of curiosity, O.P. what jobs did you have in mind that are safe and couldn’t possibly be mechanized?
Some jobs that come to mind are airline pilot - not that AI can’t fly a plane, but rather, that passengers would never dare step aboard a plane that didn’t have some human pilot in the cockpit. The human would be there for the passengers’ peace of mind.
And no matter how animated movies get, there will always be people who want to watch an actual human actor or actress, so that niche will always be there. Ditto for human musicians performing live in concert.
Some jobs may be reduced in human staffing but can’t go away permanently. A hospital will always need some sort of human doctor to be on hand for patients who want to speak to an actual human and watch the AI to make the surgeries or procedures were actually done right.
Maybe in 2023. But who can predict what people will find acceptable in ten or twenty years? By then people may have become used to being passengers in AI-driven cars and being a passenger in an AI-piloted plane won’t seem unthinkable to them.
My guess is that airlines will introduce AI pilots in non-passenger cargo flights and let them build up a documented safety record. Then there’ll be a push to introduce them in passenger flights. Probably at first as a back-up to human pilots (we already use autopilot programs to fly planes after all) and then switch to having a human pilot as the back-up to the AI. And then begin phasing out the human back-ups. Point out the cost savings involved at each step along with a promise of lower fares.
Seems like the only profession that AI can’t take over yet is ‘comedian’ or ‘comedy writer’. It doesn’t seem to quite get comedy. Maybe ChatGPT 6 or 7 will have better humor algorithms.
This will be great! No more going to college, no more soul-crushing jobs, and everyone gets to live a carefree life of luxury, sitting around eating bon-bons, with that sweet Universal Basic Income. Nobody will have to “do” anything any more.
Oh, wait. With no one making salaries any more, except for plumbers, no one has much money to spend, so all the things AI produces has no market, and businesses fail. ISTM AI-driven businesses can only be profitable as long as money is circulating thru the economy. The Information Age didn’t make work obsolete, it just created new ways to work, and I think AI will do the same. Otherwise, what is everyone gonna “do”?
All those plotlines of an amateur having to be coached in how to fly an airliner after (disaster) incapacitates the pilots are now obsolete. They probably literally have a “land the plane” button or the equivalent:
A disturbingly plausible scenario is a sort of robotic feudalism such as the planet Solaria depicted in the Asimov story “The Naked Sun”. A million or fewer humans- descendants of the original stockholders?- own and enjoy the fruits of all the automated production. The rest of humanity would be… “surplus”. Maybe some would survive as wilderness savages scavenging what they could.
Yup. A life with AI everywhere is either going to be a utopia or dystopia. It all depends on whether something like UBI comes along.
Either it’ll be the best, most comfortable idyllic existence humanity has yet known to this point, or else we’re all headed for brutal cutthroat competition trying to make ends meet in a world where it’s harder and harder for us humans to demonstrate that we’re of any useful industrial value compared to a bot.
It’ll be like Judge Dredd. Most of us will just be living our lives in our apartments in the megablocks, living off our UBI, and trying to find ways to occupy our time and avoid future shock.
Well firstly a lot of it is skilled manual labor. We’re not going back to labor-intensive farming, for example.
And we will probably all be utilizing AI in some way within our jobs; just letting the machines do the more machine-ish stuff and in theory allowing us to make the decisions, bring everything together in a useful way, and have the kind of human interactions that most of us enjoy.
Well, that’s the optimistic version anyway.
The other possibility is computers doing anything vaguely interesting, while humans clean buildings and give sponge baths to old people…
Probably reality will be somewhere down the middle.
