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I've seen many people claim that AI is just another tool that boosts our productivity and we should embrace it. They say that AI will not only fail to make us obsolete but will also create new jobs. But is this the case and are the people, who think otherwise, paranoid?
It seems reasonable to think that AI is just another tool, since any historical discovery and advancement didn't make us jobless. Calculators and even computers didn't make accountants and mathematicians obsolete, similarly, feller bunchers didn't do the same to human loggers.
And it seems this will be true forever. I'd love to think this way, but there is a problem, AI has one crucial difference: unlike any other tool, it doesn't just solve or automate some narrow problem, it also constantly learns, improves and adapts like us. And once AI does something faster, cheaper and with higher quality than an average person, that average person will be replaced. Nowadays, a non artist can quickly (often under a minute) generate a good image that an average artist could produce only in several hours if not days. A couple of years ago, such images were that artist's bread and butter... The same thing is happening in many other professions. A lot of things, including intelligence or uncommon skills, are starting to turn into commodities.
AI can ruin the lives of average people
Being average, let alone below average / disabled, is becoming more of a disadvantage. And that's the problem. Most people are average, they are not gifted or some kind of genius, they are AVERAGE. And sooner or later, AI is likely to outperform them in many domains. Meanwhile, for people with jobs the rat race wheel spins even faster by creating more workload, more pressure, more expectations, more anxiety, more detachment and more burnout.
For now, manual labor and other professions requiring interaction with the physical world seem safe. But once AI agents acquire robotic bodies, workers in these fields will also become vulnerable.
AI can even rival people who are not average at all
The most horrifying thing is that modern AI can rival even the most gifted people. For example, AI models can be so capable that they can solve math problems so complex that even the best mathematicians have been struggling to solve them for decades, if not centuries. Don't you believe? Just watch this video:
The guy in the video is Terence Tao, who is called the "Mozart of Math" and is considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians in the human history. This means that AI is beginning to challenge one of the things we traditionally considered the pinnacle of human intelligence: the ability to reason about extremely abstract problems that require extraordinary creativity, intuition, and intellectual sophistication.
The paradox of capitalism: AI could make society wealthy enough to allow less work, but we are only stressed more
And this touches one important problem related to capitalism. Capitalism has been remarkably successful at incentivizing innovation, increasing productivity, and organizing complex economic activity. But it doesn't necessarily optimize for human well being. It mostly rewards things that generate profit.
For much of industrial history, those goals overlapped sufficiently: businesses needed productive workers, workers earned wages, and wages allowed them to consume what businesses produced. And capitalism has a fundamental problem. If AI allows companies to produce the same output with 90% fewer employees, adopting AI may be the economically rational decision. But if every company does the same thing, an economy organized around employment income faces a problem. The tension is that what is rational for an individual company can be harmful for society. This is especially awkward when scarcity is no longer a major issue.
UBI?
In recent years Universal basic income (UBI) is being discussed largely because of the concerns about unemployment caused by AI. UBI is a minimum income that people (even unemployed) receive unconditionally. So, UBI might be the solution to this awful situation.
How much UBI is feasible, is debatable, but at least it could help to cover food / bills and reduce income insecurity. UBI still doesn't necessarily mean a completely fulfilling life and might be insufficient to sustain a family and to have many other optional joys of life. It just guarantees a life without starvation, homelessness and income insecurity. Although, with the right governmental incentives and the future AI / automation increase, UBI might become less taxing, thus it can increase.
In any case, UBI might be the only viable option for some people. Time will tell whether we will have a universal basic income. See you later.