AI Is Interested in You, So You’d Best Be Interested in It

AI is everywhere. It is now affecting how people do their jobs and those jobs themselves.

The future is clearly with those who have found a way of making themselves indispensable by using AI, and not with those who resist or actively fight it. You may not be interested in AI, but AI is interested in you.

Even in jobs considered safe from automation, AI is shaping daily work, from running a hospital nurses’ station to helping an electrician check available replacement equipment.

I mention those two jobs because they are the most frequently listed as being secure and unlikely to be taken over by AI. That doesn’t mean they won’t be touched by the unseen hand of AI. It is everywhere and on the move.

Graduates now leaving the colleges and universities are having a tough time finding work. Many workers who thought they were set for life are refining their resumes, particularly those in the computer field.

Meta, owner of Facebook, has laid off 8,000 workers, and an additional 7,000 will be reassigned to AI-focused positions.

The job market isn’t only reflecting AI doing the work across industries, but also the immeasurable hesitation of companies to hire for jobs that may later be taken over by AI. “ Better to hold on and see” is a common attitude in firms that aren’t sure whether AI will, in fact, help them meet their needs.

Many savants in the AI industry have warned of job losses across the employment landscape as AI takes hold. These include Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Open AI’s Sam Altman. The Economist writes about a job “catastrophe.”

My view, shared by many I have interviewed, is that there will be a sharp global drop in employment, followed by a post-revolution expansion of employment that allows for the flourishing of AI and its benefits. Open AI’s Altman has predicted a similar scenario, but he hasn’t identified when the upturn might occur — in years or decades?

There are those who believe that governments will have to provide a universal basic income to compensate for the inroads of AI. Unlikely.

The first impediment is that all the advanced countries are already spending beyond their means, including the United States and the United Kingdom. Where will the new money come from with fewer people paying taxes?

Affordability is only the first argument against a universal basic income. People are built to work. Without work, they get into trouble, deteriorate or go mad. Possibly all three.

The United Kingdom, which has many programs for the unemployed, is something of a laboratory on how not to help the jobless. A lot of people there simply haven’t tried working in a long time.

Collectively, UK social assistance programs are known as “benefits” and extend well beyond a substitute for a paycheck. They take care of everything from assisting with rent to, in some cases, assisting with entertainment.

My experience in interviewing and just knowing people who haven’t worked for a long time is that they are rootless, critical of the system that supports them and inclined to take drugs, drink or fall victim to mental illness.

Instead of state subsidies, we will likely see the gig economy boom — and it should be helped — and human creativity will flourish with it.

For that to happen, the political leadership, Democratic or Republican, needs to catch up with the fact that we may be entering into a new economic order where the old idea of employment is reduced, and waves of individual entrepreneurs are unleashed, doing everything from, say, creating new musical instruments to designing new homes from waste products, to restoring forests without uniformity.

Omar Hatamleh, who has written five books on AI, said that the challenge of AI is that it is exponential, and we think linearly. My hope is that the AI upheaval will inadvertently convert us from linear to exponential thinkers.

The political class has been notably missing from the AI fray aside from mumbling about regulating AI, which won’t help job creation.

It seems that making gig work easier and safer might be a good beginning. All the indications are that more of us will be working for ourselves going forward. The gig worker ought to be able to easily purchase Social Security insurance and access its benefits, including retirement.

It is a new time for the human race. It would be wonderful to feel that the politicians were aware of it.

We are in a political year, and AI isn’t a subject being debated, let alone eliciting new ideas. AI won’t wait.