Here in the USA, you have to be afraid for your job these days. Layoffs are rampant everywhere due to outsourcing, and now we have AI on the horizon promising to make things more efficient, but we really know what it is actually going to be used for. They want automate out everything. People packaging up goods for shipping, white collar jobs like analytics, business intelligence, customer service, chat support. Any sort of job that takes a low or moderate amount of effort or intellectual ability is threatened by AI. But once AI takes all these jobs away and shrinks the amount of labor required, what are all these people going to do for work? It’s not like you can train someone who’s a business intelligence engineer easily to go do something else like HVAC, or be a nurse. So you have the entire tech industry basically folding in on itself trying to win the rat race and get the few remaining jobs left over…
But it should be pretty obvious that you can’t run an entire society with no jobs. Because then people can’t buy groceries, groceries don’t sell so grocery stores start hurting and then they can’t afford to employ cashiers and stockers, and the entire thing starts crumbling. This is the future of AI, basically. The more we automate, the less people can do, so they don’t have jobs and no income, not able to survive…
Like, how long until we realize how detrimental AI is to society? 10 years? 15?
Once it stops making money.
With a couple niche exceptions, AI hasn’t started making money. What it has done is attract venture capital investment.
Venture capitalists are driven by a fear of missing out on the next big thing. A billion dollar score pays for a thousand bad million dollar bets, and AI that lives up to the hype could be worth trillions. This is also why every existing tech company is scrambling to add an AI thing to its products even where it makes no sense.
My theory is that it will never stop making money because they want less people in society in general, it’s a way of trying to kill people off without actually having to do it yourself. As the number of people shrinks due to poverty and being unable to feed themselves, basically mass homelessness, and only the elite few surviving, those elite few won’t have to do anything because they already had tons of money, and now AI can do all the hard work that they were too proud to do before. So I think it’ll always be profitable. Just not for everyone.