The robots are here for your jobs, but it’s not the self-driving trucks (yet) or ones stocking groceries at the supermarket. (And self-checkout at the supermarket is not even a bot, but just transferring the labor from the clerk to the customer.) No, the bot that came for your job is AI, and it’s coming for the jobs that primarily use brain power.
Historically, those who work with their brains received higher status (and usually more money) than those who work with their hands. People pay exorbitant amounts for education to get brain jobs in law, banking, consulting, tech, etc. Some get PhDs for prestige jobs in academia and the field formerly known as journalism. Working with your brain meant you were in higher demand and less easily replaced.
Not anymore. With AI making ever more rapid advances, it will soon be trivial to mimic the output of many brain workers without having to pay salaries and health benefits. This understandably scares people, not only because many of them could be deprived of their livelihoods in short order, but also due to its disruptive effects on society generally. What are people going to do with themselves once AI is better than them at thinking?
But this line of reasoning seems akin to “what are people going to do with themselves physically, now that we have the horse (or camel) to carry large loads across long distances?” Or now that we have steam ships and railroads, or washer-dryers and dishwashers. Labor-saving machines have always displaced humans doing that particular kind of labor, and usually it frees them to do other work to which humans are better suited.
The difference in this case is twofold, however: (1) The disruption isn’t in a couple narrow industries but likely cuts across a giant swath of them; and (2) Isn’t mental work precisely the kind of labor to which humans are uniquely suited and into which physical-labor-saving machines fortuitously pushed them?
I think (1) is the bigger concern — the shift could be seismic, and there will be major second-order effects, some of which could be destabilizing. But we survived the transition to the internet which was itself massive, and AI might (or might not) be as big a transition.
As for (2), I don’t see much difference between a horse being faster, stronger and more capable at carrying heavy loads across space and an AI-bot being smarter, faster cheaper and more capable of doing investment or case law research and drafting a first pass at a legal brief. It was a task a human could do, but it’s what I would call a menial-mental task (possible I’ve created a new oxymoron.)
Yes, it takes brain power, but it’s the type of brain power that’s more about effort and focused knowledge and less about creativity, vision and judgment, i.e., the things that matter. (There’s certainly a need for those things in investing or bringing a legal case, but there are aspects of those processes that might be better outsourced to AI.)
Of course, just as having a horse for long-distance travel doesn’t mean humans shouldn’t walk or run for their own enjoyment and to stay fit, and having AI capable of destroying you in chess doesn’t mean you shouldn’t sharpen your wits by playing against your friends. People will still use their meager menial-mental powers the same way we use our modest physical ones.
But in the end, AI will save us menial-mental labor the same way our animals and machines saved us physical labor. If you don’t have a purpose beyond your work identity or your ability to push paper or numbers in a narrowly prescribed way, that’s not an AI problem — it’s an indication you have sold yourself short.