AI: Friend or Foe?
AI, the shorthand symbol for artificial intelligence, is not merely a technological development that enhances productivity. It is also an attack on the viability of most of humanity. Elon Musk, who knows something about the subject, said recently that AI’s ability to be programmed to replace so many human jobs is leading us into communism in which everyone would be given the same income with which to purchase the goods and services produced by AI.
Policymakers and economists are unaware of the real threat of AI. Instead, they worry about a dystopian world in which machines superior to humans have taken over. This concern is a red herring. Machines are inanimate matter. They are not alive. They don’t have sentience. Geeks confuse computation ability with the ability to think. AI is programmed. It can do tasks that humans can program it to do. AI cannot program itself, because AI cannot think or create. There is no spectrum at which at some point computational ability becomes thought.
A friend who is a software engineer told me recently, as I reported, that his employer told the engineers that they would be replaced in 3 years by AI. This announcement gave them time to find a different kind of employment.
The announcement could be premature and wrong. The employer could easily be carried along by false beliefs in AI’s potency. But it is plausible that if software engineering procedures can be programed into machines, the machines can use the program to produce the needed software for the application. But it takes a human to tell AI what to come up with. AI has no way of knowing on its own.
A friend who was an accomplished architect told me some years ago that architects no longer needed to know how to design a building. AI did it for them. The architect’s input was to give AI the parameters of the building.
Many years ago a cab driver in NYC who was an engineering student told me that they still had to learn math, but never needed to use it, because they had software programs.
AI is most dangerous to routine and programmable jobs. What is not understood is that AI is not just another technological development that displaces one kind of work with another–producers of buggy whips and wagons replaced with producers of cars, or the replacement of the way of organizing work, such as the replacement of the putting out system of cloth production by factory production. The difference between a dispersed work force and one concentrated in a factory is totally different from AI which replaces people, not less effective ways of organizing production or replacement of one product with another. AI eliminates jobs without creating new ones. People are no longer necessary to do many jobs, and where are the replacement jobs? The number of people with 120-130 IQs capable of doing high level work are limited in number.
Consider the offshoring of US manufacturing jobs, followed by research and design jobs. Economists promised that new and better jobs would take the place of “dirty fingernail manufacturing jobs,” but they did not.
We know for an absolute fact that the American middle class has shrunk. We know for an absolute fact that America’s once powerful manufacturing cities have shrunk in population by as much as 20%, leaving them without a tax base to support existing levels of commitments and expenditure.
As the replacement jobs for the offshored manufactured jobs as promised by Harvard and Dartmouth university economists did not happen, what jobs are going to replace the millions of jobs lost to AI?
It is possible that AI could be managed by humans to improve human productivity as any other capital investment would do instead of creating massive unemployment requiring a universal income. But in capitalism profits are the god, and profits come from eliminating labor costs. The corporations can end up with low cost production and no consumers with incomes to purchase.
A colleague and I are going to investigate, as best we can with our capabilities, whether AI can relieve people of the dreariness of so many jobs without destroying their lives. Can AI enhance life, or can it only leave humans without purpose?
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