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Kinda yes, in a more serious sense, there will be new roles for humans
to play with respect to moderating technologies; "Bladerunners" might not be exactly what P.K Dick imagined, but maybe
not so far off. If we take AI to be the science fiction vision we seem to wish for
then it will require managing, stewarding, planning, opposing,
judging, teaching, healing, hunting down and deactivating, sabotaging,
negotiating with.... Bricklayers became architects, surveyors and town planners as
complexity increased in the construction world. Cities evolved to have
traffic wardens and police... but the same has yet to really mature in
digital technology. We imagine all these benefits of "smart cities"
and "digital working" - many ideologies that have been around since
the 1970s. Yet software engineering is still in its infancy with
respect to civic function, ethics, rights and responsibilities,
remedies and rules. We have a more or less laissez-faire free-for-all market economy that
produces isolated "goods". The failure of this default model can be
seen in the tombstones of the Google graveyard. And, while it was a
driver of innovation for some time, it isn't really working out in the
big "civic" sense, and we certainly cannot rely upon centralised mega
monopoly Big-Tech to do the right thing (except in a William Gibson
style techno-fascist dystopia). So I think many timeless jobs will adapt so that technologies can fit
into our society, as welcome, well-managed friends, rather than
allowing them to take-over our society. Maintaining that balance will
be a new frontier for human intellectual labour in teaching, legal,
planning and policing functions. |