AI and Human Value
AI is going to replace a lot of jobs.
A job is the creation of value for someone else using the leverage of personal skill and knowledge.
At the root of both of those things - creating value and leveraging a personal asset - ultimately boils down to learning. Learning what product or service has a demand and then acquiring a skill set to fulfill that demand.
Machines now have the ability to learn.
We often derive a skill set based on some personal interest and then go to the marketplace in search of a business looking for that skill set.
The marketplace is rarely efficient in producing human happiness. If you have a job that you love that makes someone else’s life better and you can do it without making another person’s life worse, congratulations… you’ve found the sweet spot.
I’d argue that’s rarely the case, though. I’m typing this on an iPhone. A brief search and I’ll discover a very uneven marketplace of human happiness behind the creation of this object. A quick look into the history of Foxxcon and how lithium is being mined and you realize someone’s convenience is often someone else’s misery.
But you don’t have to be a child mining cobalt in the Congo so I can send dunk memes while I’m on the toilet to be miserable.
While vastly different on the scale of human rights, the slow grind of a cubicle (or the asocial home office) can create a misery of its own.
Yet it’s OUR misery. Keep your filthy AI hands off of it.
What that socioeconomic agreement to be miserable at a job is ultimately about, though, is money.
Beyond the potential social unrest that can be exacerbated by AI’s misuse as a disinformation engine, the real “replacement theory” has nothing to do non-white, non-Americans taking our jobs.
It has everything to do with our centuries old model of how we survive and even thrive in a complex society.
The fascism and authoritarianism we’re seeing bubbling up on the political right is the canary in the coal mine. A society whose collective identity is largely shaped by economic status and material accumulation will ultimately succumb to the smokescreens of fascist religiosity, racism, misogyny, and xenophobia when the means for realizing that identity are out of reach for the majority.
Smokescreens that are exploited by grifters and sociopaths trying to make a buck and usurp power off of serious social unrest.
AI will be taking a lot of jobs. It’s inevitable. People value time more than they value “job creating”. All people are looking to maximize their quality of life in whatever way they define that. Few perceive working more hours and having less quality time as their life’s goal.
It’s conceivable that a future awaits us where a machine can learn and fulfill a good or service far faster and better than humans can.
We will have to redefine our value away from our job titles.
That’s scary for a giant part of the population.
Work often creates a convenient excuse to never actually get to know ourselves.
Our actual value.