I find myself caught between two forces on this issue. My dad is one of those tech dads, who watches David Shapiro and builds his own GPTs in his free time. He is convinced that AI has (or will imminently have) the ability to replace us as workers entirely. Economically, we are not ready for that. People who don’t work just don’t get to have anything. Food and housing aren’t even universal human rights.
The urge for me to stick my head in the sand, despite my father pushing me to learn to use AI, is very real. I don’t have faith that we as a society will be able to make a good future with AI. So my only option feels like learning to build, manipulate, and wield the tool that I believe could cause enormous societal upheaval, because the alternative is to be upheaved like a modern boomer dropped in the middle of Cyberpunk’s Night City.
Yeah the dark future is that AI takes up all of the office type jobs that just require reading and writing text and the only jobs left are physical labor that everyone is forced into to survive whether we need to do it or not.
My hope is that when we have AI to do these “intellectual” jobs and machines to do the manual labor there will necessarily be not enough work for everyone and society will be forced to reckon with the fact that we have so much abundance that humans don’t need to work if they don’t want to. Something that’s been true for a while but has been swept under the rug for a number of reasons.
