AI is going to impact industries in unprecedented ways. Both blue- and white-collar workers are just starting to feel the effects. From fully-automatized factories to autonomous vehicles to creativity-focused language/generative models, AI is revolutionizing our relationship with work.
Work is multifaceted in the sense that it not only covers our financial needs. As I wrote previously, “there’s a higher-level necessity of self-realization and fulfillment: Work gives life meaning.”
Here are some questions for us to discuss. Feel free to ask/answer any other questions you may have on this.
What’s your job? Do you think AI can threaten your job/industry?
Do you think you could, as an individual, get around it and develop the skills needed in an AI-driven industry? Do you think governments should implement collective solutions like UBI?
How would you approach life after work? Do you think we humans are inherently tied to working or can we find meaning elsewhere?
>> Do you think you could, as an individual, get around it and develop the skills needed in an AI-
>> driven industry?
I am not sure that "skills" is the right word here. There is a *huge* category of jobs that will never -- by "never" I mean for the rest of this century -- be replaced by AI no matter how good -- how "skillful" -- the technology gets. Those are jobs that have as an essential element the requirement that their practitioner be a human being. (In a sense the job *is* being a human.) AI will never replace Rabbis or anyone else with a spiritual function. (I admit the existence of prayer wheels does mystify me a bit.) It will replace a few therapists but not most, and certainly nobody practicing alternative therapies like acupuncture or homeopathy or Reiki. If you eat in a expensive restaurant your waiter will be a human (most restaurants will be automated, but not the expensive ones). There are a lot of jobs where the parties buying the service like to feel they are interacting with someone with the same history -- someone who went to high school and worried about their popularity and got married and had kids and got divorced -- and are willing to pay for that qualification. In the future all jobs will require that those filling them be humans. And there will be plenty of them.
UBI was the dream of 1968's "Autunno caldo" in Europe. Don't discount it, but don't hand it to the profiteers, they'll find ways to use it to enslave you. The South African experience of the past thirty years shows exactly what power politicians can wield over those that were "liberated".
In my opinion, AI is the only discipline that can create the financial stratum on which UBI can be based. But the condition is that greed intended to increase inequality is first revealed as destructive and, like other emotions, humans learn to control it.
AI can of course, also be designed to be greedy. And they can also learn that from human examples. Try to imagine that!
My day job is hardware design for electrical engineering. AI could threaten my job, but such a turn of events is beyond the horizon - perhaps beyond a 'singularity.' So much else will have changed by that point that the world will already have changed beyond recognition.
AI is just starting to appear in areas such as PCB design. Probably "AI" is already in use for IC design - just guessing. UBI is a non sequitur.
"Life after work" was earlier proposed for a then-future mature industrial economy. It has been possible for decades. Literally. But somehow we devolved into a ... "neo feudal" age? A few have struck it rich in this generation. But a more common question in the Information Age is how to un-tether oneself at all. Many don't even have their own life after 5:00pm, which used to be a standard shift only one generation ago. One may have 'free' time at any time of the day, yet no completely free time ever.
I am an academic. I see great potential for AI to replace standard teaching--in fact I could see it replace it almost entirely with the advent of LLM with APIs. I learned my first programming language LISP from an experimental CMU interactive system and loved the self pacing aspect. I enjoy teaching and see a role for inspiration and motivation by teachers, as well as guidance of projects, but most of the teaching can be automated especially at third level undergraduate, not postgrad and PhD in particular. I am also a researcher. I always have had a fascination with automation, starting with automated theorem proving and later on research on program synthesis. Needless to say the GPT developments on the coding side gave me pause for thought. I believe that ultimately research will greatly be aided by AI but not quickly replaced. Definitely neural networks capture an aspect of research--creating models of a complex reality, even though it is at the heart numerical analysis, ie approximations via functions so still limited in capturing intelligence.
>> Do you think you could, as an individual, get around it and develop the skills needed in an AI-
>> driven industry?
I am not sure that "skills" is the right word here. There is a *huge* category of jobs that will never -- by "never" I mean for the rest of this century -- be replaced by AI no matter how good -- how "skillful" -- the technology gets. Those are jobs that have as an essential element the requirement that their practitioner be a human being. (In a sense the job *is* being a human.) AI will never replace Rabbis or anyone else with a spiritual function. (I admit the existence of prayer wheels does mystify me a bit.) It will replace a few therapists but not most, and certainly nobody practicing alternative therapies like acupuncture or homeopathy or Reiki. If you eat in a expensive restaurant your waiter will be a human (most restaurants will be automated, but not the expensive ones). There are a lot of jobs where the parties buying the service like to feel they are interacting with someone with the same history -- someone who went to high school and worried about their popularity and got married and had kids and got divorced -- and are willing to pay for that qualification. In the future all jobs will require that those filling them be humans. And there will be plenty of them.
UBI was the dream of 1968's "Autunno caldo" in Europe. Don't discount it, but don't hand it to the profiteers, they'll find ways to use it to enslave you. The South African experience of the past thirty years shows exactly what power politicians can wield over those that were "liberated".
In my opinion, AI is the only discipline that can create the financial stratum on which UBI can be based. But the condition is that greed intended to increase inequality is first revealed as destructive and, like other emotions, humans learn to control it.
AI can of course, also be designed to be greedy. And they can also learn that from human examples. Try to imagine that!
My day job is hardware design for electrical engineering. AI could threaten my job, but such a turn of events is beyond the horizon - perhaps beyond a 'singularity.' So much else will have changed by that point that the world will already have changed beyond recognition.
AI is just starting to appear in areas such as PCB design. Probably "AI" is already in use for IC design - just guessing. UBI is a non sequitur.
"Life after work" was earlier proposed for a then-future mature industrial economy. It has been possible for decades. Literally. But somehow we devolved into a ... "neo feudal" age? A few have struck it rich in this generation. But a more common question in the Information Age is how to un-tether oneself at all. Many don't even have their own life after 5:00pm, which used to be a standard shift only one generation ago. One may have 'free' time at any time of the day, yet no completely free time ever.
I am an academic. I see great potential for AI to replace standard teaching--in fact I could see it replace it almost entirely with the advent of LLM with APIs. I learned my first programming language LISP from an experimental CMU interactive system and loved the self pacing aspect. I enjoy teaching and see a role for inspiration and motivation by teachers, as well as guidance of projects, but most of the teaching can be automated especially at third level undergraduate, not postgrad and PhD in particular. I am also a researcher. I always have had a fascination with automation, starting with automated theorem proving and later on research on program synthesis. Needless to say the GPT developments on the coding side gave me pause for thought. I believe that ultimately research will greatly be aided by AI but not quickly replaced. Definitely neural networks capture an aspect of research--creating models of a complex reality, even though it is at the heart numerical analysis, ie approximations via functions so still limited in capturing intelligence.