Work and artificial intelligence

Not too long ago (in human history anyway) the way to find out some information was to read a book or series of papers. Wires and signals gave way to tapping on a keyboard and staring at the screen whilst you wait for a website to show you a list of potential answers to your question. Finally even that approach is being displaced. Now that website shows you a summary for your query tailored by artificial intelligence. In fact, most are now using AI-based chat apps in place of search engines.

The future

We outsourced the task of sifting through shelves of books and papers to algorithms and search engines. Now humans are beginning to do the same for the selection of that information, something they previously did by hand and eye themselves.

But that is not all. In tech circles we tend to be overzealous in our predictions of the future. However, the future often ends up not too far away from the wild predictions, in this instance programmers are one of the first waves to be deeply affected both positively and negatively, they are the first in a generational change that will continue across any knowledge-based or repeatable computer-based tasks.

Of course there are unresolved issues on either side of this change, for example:

• What happens when scaling requirements overtake power capacity? - Worse, our ability to create new power capacity?
• How will different nations with varying levels of reliance on technology adopt increasingly black-box seemingly magical systems?
• Assuming improvement, automation, scale and adoption accelerate to where many believe they can, what happens to the existing western capitalist model when both labour demand falls and services based economies begin to consolidate?
• Should one model company succeed and achieve some form of advanced monopoly (unlikely at present but possible). What then? Both for corporations and more globally nations and their people? Hypothetically, artificial general intelligence (AGI) could be so powerful it becomes a larger global threat as a weapon system than conventional or nuclear weapon, what happens when this tool is not shared equally?
• Will advancement outrun capital? Contrasting the advancement prediction and its capital cost, there is a question as to whether income generation and research and development costs outpace available capital, will the technology race outrun the capital race? Or will the capital race outrun the technology race?

We are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think. - António R. Damásio