Today, AI is not ready for general work, but it is potentially suitable, and often potentially perfect, for specialised domains. The thing that’s stopping them getting to general intelligence levels is that same that stopped them being practical for specialist domains only until recently, that of computing power. As computers get more powerful, so AIs will become more intelligent.
When information technology arrived back in the 1980s, a lot of predictions were made that most of us would spend most of our time relaxing. What actually happened was most of us spent more time working. The same predictions are made about AI. But this time round they might well have something to them, given it seems AI will automate something like 50% of professions (consider reports from the torygraph, the bbc, tech republic). It looks to me that the implications to society of AI will be enormous. It’s not surprising politicians are taking note.
It is surprising to me, though, that there are already social experiments to introduce the kind of economic structures that allows people to live in a post job society. One concept is that of a basic income. Everyone receives it, no matter what, and it’s enough to live on. This old idea is being tried out now in different forms in different places, such as Utrecht. I think that, over the next few years, it’ll become clear how such a scheme might be implemented effectively.
If people have no job, they have no reason to live, to misquote Prof Vardi’s reported opinion in the torygraph piece. I don’t share this pessimistic opinion, because of the aristocratic experience. Aristocrats, historically, were quite notorious for leaving full lives without needing to hold down a job. Indeed, I know people now whose parents left them enough money for them to do the same thing, and they strike me as more poetical than suicidal. Rather, as the experience of previous centuries suggests, living without working is at the apex of society, not the nadir. If aristocrats could have the life the others aspired to in the 18th and 19th centuries, why are such lives seen as dismal by some now? I don’t get it. Not needing to work is like not needing to be in chains, it’s not so much a reason to be depressed, more a reason to party. Those aristocrats are role models for people to live full lives without needing a job.
Clearly, the arrival of AI is likely to cause great social upheaval. In my opinion, some of us will be lucky enough to live in civilised societies, where the economic structure will be adapted to enable everyone to live a reasonable life. Others will live in societies with a deep social insanity where the victims of automation will be maligned, causing an instability that will put their societies on the permanent cusp of revolution (which some of the selfish may regard as positive, so long as it doesn’t affect them). AI adds instability to the world, the instability of liberty. I suspect a social order’s survival will come down to the conflict between national responsibility and national arseholedom.