| While robotics are still relatively immature, I would think of AI as something akin to a remote worker. Anything a human remote worker can do, a super human remote worker will be able to do better, faster and for a fraction of the cost – this includes work that humans currently do in offices but could theoretically done remotely. We should therefore assume if (when) AI broadly surpasses the capabilities of a human remote worker it will not longer make economic sense to hire humans for these roles. Should we assume this then what is the human's role in the labour market? It won't be their physical abilities (the industrial revolution replaced the human's role here), it won't be their reasoning abilities (AI will soon replace the human's here), but perhaps jobs which require both physical dexterity and human-level reasoning ability humans might still retain an edge? Perhaps at least for now we can assume jobs like roofing, plumbing, and gardening will continue to exist. While jobs like coding, graphic design and copy writing will almost certainly be replaced. I think the only long-term question at the moment is how long it will take for robotics to catch up and provide something akin to human-level dexterity with super-human intelligence? At which point I'm not sure why anyone would hire a human except from the novelty of it – perhaps like the novelty of riding a horse into town. AI is so obviously not like other technologies. Past technologies effectively just found ways to automate low-intelligence tasks and augment human strength via machinery. Advanced robotics and AI is fundamentally different in their ability to cut into human labour, and combined it's hard to see any edge to a human labourer. But ether way, even if you subscribe to this notion that AI will not take all human jobs it seems very likely that AI will displace many more jobs than the industrial revolution did, and at a much much faster pace. Additionally, it will target those who are most educated, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it unlike the working class who are easy to ignore and tell to re-skill, my guess would be that demands will be made for UBI and large reorganisations of our existing economic and political systems. My point is, the likelihood any of this will end well is close to zero, even if you just believe AI will replace a bunch of inefficient jobs like software engineers. |