Are You Ready, Buckle Up, This Ride is Mandatory!

The reality of "AI" (from someone who has spent their life in IT) is that we are in the same place our teachers were when they told us to not use calculators back in the day because "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket." AI is here, it's currently as dumb and more useless than it will ever be in the future. At this point we either embrace it and start to learn to use it to our advantage, or stand on the lawn yelling at 404 errors.

As the future envelops us, traditional jobs will disappear (I've tried being unemployed, it never works), and even less traditional jobs will follow. There's no coming back from this state of affairs. Self-driving cars are problematic (but getting better (and they don't have to be perfect, just better than we are)). That's almost the case now if you don't cut corners like Elon likes to do and actually use the available tech like Lidar and don't force passengers to listen to Nickelback. I'm putting money on driving jobs (gig driving jobs will disappear first, followed by delivery services then all the way down to your pizza delivery) will disappear within a generation (that's 20 years (30 if you count like a millennial)). Customer service is already going that way, and there will come a time when you ask to "speak to a human" and you'll just get a better trained model (maybe one that doesn't even know it's an AI (and you won't know either)). Right now AI codes better than most new graduates, that's today, in 10 years we won't need the middleman anymore that helps the AI get past hurdles, AI will help itself (there are already AIs whose primary job is finding bugs and exploits in your code (you will note Microsoft does not use any of them))! The Medical field will be the longest holdout but only because of our fear of not having a human in the loop. Digital assistants already do a huge part of the workload in medicine making sure your medications don't fight with each other at your expense, reminding your physician of your latex allergy, and making sure your records get entered into your file. Robots and AI help in the operating rooms too, they just aren't controlling the scalpel, yet, but they don't ever have to be perfect, just better than us meatbags before it's easier to get malpractice for an AI robot and nearly impossible for a human Doctor.

We need to be ready for what's coming, prepare for the future (instead of holding onto a past that no longer exists). We have to understand the way our economy must change to accommodate what's coming and make sure society has the right tools for the job. Universal Basic Income (bien-être et socialisme, oh mon dieu!) is part of that. When all the fast food joints and factories and customer service positions are replaced by screens and mechanical arms, when drivers are no longer human and gig jobs are gone, as much as 30% or more of our population will be out of work and unable to get more work (for those of us in the right age group that's called retired). No economy that can withstand the hit of 30% of its population not being able to buy a cheeseburger (imagine an entire country full of people begging for money to buy a cheeseburger today that they can pay you back for on Tuesday). The way over that hump is the people that employ AI and robotics have to make sure that the people they sell to can buy those products or they fail too. That answer (unless and until we find a better one) is UBI, perhaps it's framed differently and maybe means tested, but that's the only path that I can see, and not at minimum subsistence levels.

We are coming up on the edge of the end of scarcity depending on the decisions we make. We can decide to turn the world we have into Star Trek, or we can turn it into Soylent Green, and that decision is based on us accepting the inevitable future and preparing for it. Or we can fight it and not be prepared for its inevitability.

That choice is each of ours, individually.

--Doc (yeah I said it!)
find me anywhere under @DocAtCDI