I might have found a remedy for the Mad Men withdrawal symptoms. “Halt and Catch Fire” – that’s where the line is from. While the show has me glued, it also made me really consider the connection between money & AI.
A key factor that is driving the increasing adoption of AI in the work context is efficiency. Somewhere in the equation of calculating efficiency lies money, and how much of it can be saved. I am ignoring ‘time’ for now, because even that, mostly comes down to “time is money”. Jobs increasingly become task oriented and the objective is to make each task more and more efficient. If we continue that way, the pessimistic AI future is easy to imagine – it will happen in a ‘frog in boiling water’ manner, but it will happen.
If you’re up for a long read, I’d recommend A World Without Work. It explores not just the economics of the subject but also the psychological and societal aspects, using Youngstown, Ohio as a reference point. (its collapse began with the shutting down of its steel mills) In many lines of work, automation is inevitable immediately because of the sheer economics of it. As AI becomes better, its scope and the kind of work it can accomplish (and thereby take away jobs) will only increase, many tasks in the much touted ‘gig economy’ included. Uber, which is seen a poster child of this phenomenon, is actually competing with Google on driverless cars! I dare say that many will be in denial until it impacts them directly, but that will be too late.
Thus, a pessimistic view of an AI future is that we will build something that makes our species irrelevant. The optimistic view is that everything we classify as ‘work’ will be taken care of, the costs of essentials will come down, and we can spend all of our time on adding value to those around us in ways we find an absolute pleasure in. I am reasonably sure that when we do get there, and that’s a while away, the scenario will be somewhere between these two.
For it to be a ‘pleasant’ journey, maybe we should be (first) understanding, and then applying that statement in the beginning to money as well. “Money isn’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets us to the thing.” The role of AI in the future may have a lot to do with the role of money in our lives today. From a societal standpoint, the value of a human will keep decreasing unless we change our view of money, starting now.
P.S. I’m rather hoping that in Google’s Alphabet, H is for Humans. If they’re trying to conquer death, they better have a plan for all those immortals!