Artificial intelligence will inevitably replace jobs en masse, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, argues Calum Chace, author of Surviving AI and co-host of the London Futurist podcast.
Speaking on a panel at the Beneficial Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Summit in Panama — attended by Cointelegraph reporters — Chace presented five major misconceptions about AI’s impact on the future of work.
The first misconception is a long-held belief that machines taking over everyone's jobs could “never happen,” stated Chace.
Chace believes AI advancements would have the same sweeping effect as factories and cars that eventually replaced “muscle jobs” in the past — though this time, it would impact “cognitive jobs.”
Only days ago, financial services firm Klarana announced in a Feb. 27 blog post that an AI-powered assistant was effectively doing the work of around 700 full-time customer service agents.
Wow Klarna's AI customer support agent is able to handle 2/3rd of the requests by itself in its first month and is doing the job of an equivalent of 700 agents. pic.twitter.com/q67oatRiua
— Tanay Jaipuria (@tanayj) February 27, 2024
However, Chace argued that even if AI were to take jobs, which he dubs “technological unemployment” — there’s a misconception that this would somehow be bad for society.
“A world in which humans don’t have to do jobs will be great. The idea that humans have to be wage slaves forever is actually a really pessimistic position,” he said.
Chace said a third misconception is that a life without work would be meaningless. Chace argued that there are “plenty of people” who don’t have jobs who are still perfectly happy and pointed to retirees, aristocrats and children as prime examples.
However, not everyone on the panel shared Chace’s optimism on this point, with filmmaker and AI commentator James Barrat sharing his own experiences with “technological unemployment.”
“I was lucky enough to grow up among a lot of craftspeople who are very proud of what they do. They derive a lot of satisfaction from their work and in fact, it's really inseparable from themselves,” he said.
“Most of the people I know were hardworking people who, once they retired, have declined because there wasn’t a sense of accomplishment or camaraderie.”
Chace also gave his thoughts on the concept of universal basic income (UBI), which many believe could help mitigate the impact of AI-induced unemployment, describing it as “possibly the most overrated idea ever.”
“If UBI was big enough to be useful and effective, it wouldn’t be affordable. If it was affordable, it's not big enough to be useful,” he said.
“It’s because of that little word in the middle, ‘basic.’ We have to do much better than giving everybody a subsistence income.”
James Hughes, an Associate Professor of Ethics at the University of Massachusetts, pushed back on Chace’s skepticism toward UBI, saying that AI would only further a growing inequality between workers and generations, and added that UBI was the only plausible solution to fix it.
“What we need is a positive vision of a future with less work because you can already see the economic insecurities in areas that have been hurt by automation in the United States,” he said.
“In general, college-educated workers tend to think it’s going to be pretty good for them, and blue-collar workers tend to be more pessimistic. So I think we really need to sell a positive vision of AI and for universal basic income to be a part of that.”
The final misconception was the idea that AI-led unemployment would be “gradual” and predictable.
Instead, Chace says while machine replacement could begin as a gradual change, there would be a “sudden” reckoning where AI is capable of doing the majority of human work, putting almost everyone out of a job instantly.
Ted Goertzel, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University-Camden splashed cold water over the recent AI doom and gloom, saying that he’d lived through many “extermination panics” such as nuclear war, and that the outcry over AI was no different.
Still, Goertzel conceded that AI could play a role in future warfare, predicting that wars between nations would be fought with AI-powered drones and robotics instead of humans.
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