Looking into the AI future

“Initially, AI will have a broadly augmentative effect, taking over low-value tasks and empowering humans to focus their efforts on more strategic and creative jobs.

But at some stage, likely in five years or so, AI will start to take over entire job roles, starting with the most “procedural” or rules-based jobs. Eventually, it will acquire enough decision-making and orchestration capabilities to take over entire teams and even lines of business.”

 Vala Afshar, ZD Net, “Six levels of autonomous work: How AI augments, then replaces”, August 25, 2024

For a while, I was reading news articles proclaiming that hiring managers were only going to hire those with AI skills, including for non-techie jobs such as finance and marketing. But what kind of AI skills? Knowing how to train an AI model? Knowing how to develop the algorithms? Or was it just knowing how to set up good prompts? The news articles just didn’t give sufficient details to tell me what I may need to do.

Then came another set of articles where some CEOs or senior executives were saying stuff like the AI was limited and everybody was still trying to figure out how to make really good use out of AI, beyond just making it write emails faster. Everybody was still trying to figure out how to find that “killer app” that would set their company apart.

So, it’s confusing out there.

No one really knows what to do and so companies were seeking out consulting firms to help them figure out what to do. Basically, they were paying consulting firms to learn how to use AI on their dime rather than trying to explore AI or maybe hire a few AI experts – although there may be very few with both business sense and AI expertise.

At the moment, us peons still have time to figure out how to deploy AI to our advantage.

The quote at the beginning came from ZD Net and gave the authors’ viewpoint on how the AI age will progress. It’s a rather dispiriting view. They are forecasting that the next five years will be the phase of using AI to augment our skills, namely because AI is not yet sophisticated enough to do the jobs beyond the rote. But between 5 to 10 years, we will face replacement and not just replacement of individual jobs but entire teams or divisions.

Unfortunately, there were no suggestions as to what us individuals can do to prepare. They only thing the authors said was for companies to plan for these phases.

If entire divisions are replaced…

…what does that do to our society? Are all of those people unemployed or do they move elsewhere? The article did not prognosticate that.

If AI becomes so capable that they “demonstrate the ability to handle situations beyond the abilities of any number of humans”, does that mean all of those people are unemployed? What do we do with such vast unemployment? Do we look like India before where the wealthy lived in one world and everyone else lived in crushing poverty?

I would think at some point, capitalism and democracy break. Unless we develop a bifurcated society where the wealthy live on another plane, figuratively, and the rest of us lead different lives. The wealthy would have their own wars amongst themselves, and the rest would be invisible to them because we don’t count.

Or we develop new value system that changes the current capitalism’s focus from money to something else, creating a new value system. Something that is not yet on our radar because it is not yet in our space of possibility.

If the article’s timeline remains true or very close to it, I had not expected this drastic disruption to happen so soon. I was kind of expecting later on, but the possibility of extremely ugly disruption has become too real.