Lately when I talk to companies, I am often asked this (intelligent) question: “isn’t there a risk that we become too dependent, addicted to these new forms of artificial intelligence? If for some reason we could no longer use them, we’d be in great difficulty”.
This is an inevitable, decisive question. One that applies to artificial intelligence as much as to all the other great technologies we have created and that have become permanently embedded in our lives, the cornerstones on which humanity rests.
Some of these are intuitive: the internet, computers, electricity, the steam engine. Can you imagine the world without them? Close your eyes. Starting tomorrow, the Internet disappears. Starting tomorrow, electricity vanishes. How dependent are we on them? Viscerally. I’m not saying civilisation would disappear in a short time, but we’d all have a very rough time.
There are other technologies that have been so thoroughly absorbed over time that we no longer even consider them as such. Agriculture is a technology, writing is a technology, the production of metal alloys is a technology, the wheel is a technology, fire is a technology.
How dependent is our species on them? In an indissoluble way, for millennia. Our ability to become symbiotic with the technologies we invent — rendering some of our capabilities obsolete to make room for others — is literally what distinguishes us from other animals.
So to that question I answer: yes, not only is there a risk that we become dependent, but I hope it happens as soon as possible, so that we can move on to our next evolutionary stage.
The objection then becomes: but this technology is different from the others, it emulates our cognitive faculties. Fire, wheel, electricity, internet were not like that.
Perhaps, but I’m sure the same argument was made back then too. Each of these great technologies was in its own way “different” from all the previous ones, seemed more risky, had potentially catastrophic implications.
This AI, combined with robotics, threatens to replace human beings, sooner or later, in all jobs — both physical and cognitive. A disaster.
A disaster? Or a blessing?
What is our purpose? What do we strive for? Why do we study, discover, invent, improve, grow? Don’t we do it, as a species, to continually overcome our limits? And don’t those limits depend on our intrinsic condition of scarcity?
The scarcity constraints that limit us are many, from energy production to available natural resources to calorie production (food). An important constraint is certainly the necessity of working to produce and sustain ourselves. Culturally, especially over the last 150 years, work has been sweetened, narrated as what gives us purpose, a dignity in society. A clever act of ennobling to make its weight feel a little less burdensome, and yet work (the literal kind — salaried, unavoidable to pay for food and shelter) is ultimately a necessary prison.
I believe humanity is destined to make work completely superfluous and I believe the wellbeing of our species will grow immeasurably as we succeed.
Therefore every time we manage to make a job no longer necessary, we should rejoice — we are one step closer to achieving our intent.
The elimination of obsolete jobs has always existed; what is new is that advances in AI and robotics will considerably accelerate the pace and variety with which jobs disappear. And no, it is likely that there will be no replacement — not forever at least. We will reach a point (still quite distant in time) where for every job eliminated, no new one will emerge. Before that, it will happen that for one eliminated job it will be almost impossible to retrain whoever held it for a different job that is still needed, because people have a very low degree of fungibility. Try retraining a warehouse worker as a cardiac surgeon.
This strong tension that will arise on labour markets must be seen from a perspective of possibility — it will be one of the great transformative forces on some of the foundational institutions on which civilisation rests, institutions that are ageing but resisting the metamorphosis we so urgently need.
I am speaking above all of the school system and of capitalism in its incarnation as a mass consumer society.
The way we educate people will need to be razed to the ground and rethought from the foundations, bearing firmly in mind that the jobs that exist while we are educating people will probably no longer exist when those people start working, and that many of the notions they learn will by then have become outdated. So the system will have to be restructured to make it capable of teaching fungibility. The capacity to relearn — to retrain in a fluid and continuous way throughout our entire lives.
The day will come when even this will not be enough. Simply (and hopefully) there will no longer be enough necessary work for everyone. But there will be an important volume of necessary work for many others. That will be the day the economic system we have known over the last 150–200 years will naturally cease to exist, because it will no longer be possible to base it on full employment, private income, consumption, savings, taxation, public spending. Entire economic sectors will begin to emerge in which the mix between capital (AI + robots) and human labour will be completely unbalanced, if not entirely absent. There will no longer be the ability to sustain steady consumer demand through salaried income from work.
We will enter an era of great social and institutional transformation, which will also have to be carried out with unprecedented speed — a speed comparable to that of technology — to prevent the old system from imploding on itself. I am an incurable optimist; I have faith in human intellect and in our inexhaustible capacity for adaptation. We will manage. I will not live to see those times, which are distant (though less so than we imagine), but I feel fortunate to be alive today, in these fertile and vibrant years, which will probably be remembered as the dawn of a new phase for our species.
