Midsummer is peak vacation time. If you’re off work, you might wish this period of rest and relaxation was longer. But how long? Should it be forever? Wouldn’t you like to enjoy a totally carefree life?
When asked how he foresees a world driven by artificial intelligence, Elon Musk said it’s becoming a realistic possibility for everyone. “We’ll probably lose all of our jobs,” Musk said in May. “AI and robots will provide you with every product and service you want.” In response to the same question, legendary venture capitalist Vinod Khosla said that in countries that adopt these technologies, “the need for work in society will disappear within 25 years.” The details of what that will look like remain unclear. Millions of people may suffer from unemployment, or the enormous benefits of not working may be shared among us all.
Like it or not, Musk and Khosla are extraordinarily intelligent self-made billionaires, enough to make doubters nervous. But there’s good reason to be skeptical of predictions of a jobless future, whether that’s one in which most of us have to work hard to put food on the table or one in which we can lounge in a hammock with a cold drink in hand. The truth is, we’ve been in these situations before, and we’ve learned some lessons.
In the 1960s, America was fascinated by the year 2000, and some people imagined it as a wonderland, where people would be more productive by technology, work hours would be greatly reduced, and the only problem we would face would be what to do with our leisure time. How this would happen was described in a book published in 1967 called “Year 2000: Wonderland.” the year of 2000 A study by Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener of the Hudson Institute showed that if you worked 30 hours a week and took 13 weeks of vacation each year, you would still be twice as wealthy in the year 2000 as you were in 1965.
In 2000, we were working just as hard as we were in the 1960s, but far more people were working: 48% of the population vs. 38%. And yet the economy had not even reached the minimum predicted size of the 1960s. the year of 2000There’s no mystery as to what went wrong: forecasters extrapolated the past 20 years of labor productivity growth into the future, only to find that productivity growth has actually fallen sharply. The “productivity paradox” persists and is still poorly understood, but the lesson is clear: extrapolating trends decades into the future is asking for trouble.
The bright future of 2000 was wrong, but thankfully the bleak future that emerged around 1980 was even more wrong. That vision was summarized in a US government report. Global 2000With absolute confidence he predicted a colder, hungrier, poorer world, with polluted oceans and food wars in the streets; that the deadly threat to the planet is global cooling, not global warming; that it is food riots, not an obesity epidemic, that America must quell.
Like those who advocate a brighter future, those who advocate a darker future could not escape the present. They were frightened by the present and projected trend lines 20 years into the future. Like those who do today, forecasters of the past based their projections on economic data and equations, then extrapolated their results. But they overlooked important factors outside their models.
Similarly, when it comes to the future of AI, the phenomenon Musk and Khosla refer to is easy to understand: AI is already taking jobs, and will take more as the technology advances. But it would be unwise to extrapolate this trend to zero jobs, for three reasons.
It’s easy to imagine that existing jobs will be lost, but it’s nearly impossible to foresee the creation of entirely new jobs. Just before the internet started revolutionizing the world, who would have believed that people would make a living as podcasters, cryptocurrency miners, or social media influencers? What are the unimaginable jobs of 2030? Of course, proponents of almighty AI will argue that any job, even jobs in the unpredictable future, will be replaced by AI. Remember…
Humans are wired to value face-to-face interactions. We want to hear a diagnosis from a human doctor in the room, even if a chatbot can tell us the exact same thing. When the stock market crashes, thousands of investors turn to their brokers because during stressful times, we need to hear from a human and be listened to by a human. That great feeling of being in sync with someone comes from real-life synchrony. When we talk to someone face-to-face, the same areas of our brains activate at the same time. Have the same conversation digitally and the synchrony disappears. This innate aspect of the human experience isn’t likely to change anytime soon.
We feel more fulfilled when we are working. Sigmund Freud famously said, “Love and work, work and love, that’s it. Love and work are the cornerstones of humanity.” Few people in the working age would find meaning in a life of perpetual vacation.
As AI advances rapidly, ignoring the human element is a great danger. Accept that humans will inevitably do illogical and inefficient things. As long as humans are in charge, these human imperatives cannot be denied.
