A.I. Implications
A poverty of imagination
There seems to be an inherent contradiction from those who promote the power and capability A.I., and at the same time down play the impact of that power. It suggests both a lack of imagination, and the existence of unarticulated underlying assumptions, if not out-right (self or otherwise) deception. Assumptions like:
We’re going be able to thread the needle between making applications that automate a lot of knowledge work and even eliminate entire jobs, but stop short of automating too much, so that we still have enough people employed to keep consuming.
That public sector jobs can be replaced by A.I. but not private sector.
A.I. replacement ground zero
Let’s just take one example, and assume the hype around A.I. code assistants is founded. Assume that A.I. agents are or will soon be able to replace much of the work of software engineers.
It seems unlikely that an A.I. capable of replacing software engineers will only impact the opportunities and salary prospects for software engineers (akin to whale oilers), while leaving the rest of society happily more productive doing the same jobs they are now.
What would we have to assume for that to be true?
That the reasoning capabilities of a software engineering A.I. agent is extremely narrow and can only think about software engineering problems. It can’t do anything else, not accounting, finance, legal, medical, marketing, advertising, etc.
Although somehow they would still be capable of creating applications for use by all of the other disciplines.
That A.I. agents produce roughly the same quality software at the same pace as a typical engineer.
Otherwise, if it produces software substantially better and faster, then the pace of automating larger swaths of other disciplines goes up.
That A.I. agents can’t produce other A.I. agents.
Otherwise a software engineering A.I. agent could produce accounting A.I. agents, etc.
Those don’t appear to be very safe assumptions.
It is extremely unlikely that the reasoning capability of required to be a software engineer is narrowly applicable.
Its extremely unlikely that we’d produce a one-for-one replacement of software engineer with A.I. agent. More likely we’d be replacing one engineer with hundreds or thousands A.I. agents, capable of working 24x7 at light speed.
The only limiting factor being compute resources and the cost of those resources.
With an explosion of A.I. agents working around the clock we’d be looking at exponential growth of software automation. It seems highly unlikely that other jobs wouldn’t be automated out of existence too.
As we automate other disciplines, who’d be left to use products like MSOffice? A.I. agents certainly don’t need to communicate via word documents and spreadsheets. Business software used by people would cease to exist, because there’d be no one left to use it.
Knowledge workers can be replaced, but the trades will still be safe.
There’s another set of assumptions required to believe the common refrain, that working in trades like plumbing will be safer than knowledge work.
We’d have to assume:
A.I. agents can’t be used to create robotics capable of replacing plumbers, electricians, etc.
Plumber and electrician will still be good paying jobs when all knowledge workers are either unemployed (can’t afford to pay a plumber) or competing for the plumbing jobs.
Those assumptions don’t appear any safer.
The same could be said of executives and managers, who imagine themselves similarly to be immune.
There’s not a strong reason to believe management can’t be done via chat bot, nor that if that’s the only job left, it won’t be super competitive.
Logical conclusions
Simply following the logical conclusions of A.I. hype and the implications quickly leads to some pretty radical impacts on society. Either we don’t really believe the hype or we haven’t really thought through the ramifications.
And that’s without even considering the more academic concerns:
What happened to containment?
What are the moral implications of a massive A.I. slave labor force, that doesn’t question, whistle blow, or otherwise resist questionable or unethical instructions?