The sad thing is Ai will catch on for businesses as soon as they reliably and successfully replace humans with it. When an AI rack can replace 800 call takers... then we're talking about an impact on business.
And a impact on those 800 people now without a job, insurance, stability.
It's going to be a freaking MESS when this hits hard.
While I am not a huge fan of AI (I find it annoying, and with the potential to cause all sorts of problems if we trust it) I am also not in the doom and gloom camp.
Every single time we as humans have advanced the technology in the labor market, some people have been hurt short term, but then the labor market has adjusted, vastly increased in productivity, and the economy and wages have grown as a result.
I think the same will happen with AI. I doubt it will ever be able to replace humans completely, but it will likely get to the point where it - just like when we first got computers on our desks - is a technology that aids human employees and makes them more productive.
This will result in fewer people being needed for the same work, but on the flipside this will also lower the cost of that work, allowing the product or service that company sells to be cheaper, expanding its market, etc. etc, growing markets and the economy and creating other jobs for those who lost them.
This happened with an industry I used to work in. (though I worked there long after this happened).
I used to work in the design and development of HPLC systems. Back in the 80's chromatography was hard. It took a Chemist with an advanced degree packing his own columns and waiting hours or even days for a single sample to gravity feed through and be analyzed by some sensor on the other side.
Then they found a way to do it at increasingly high pressures with pre-manufactured columns and increasingly effective sensors, and auto-samplers, etc, etc. all controlled by a computer. A single desktop could over a network control a room full of HPLC or UHPLC systems. What used to take a PhD Chemist a week or a month, could eventually be condensed down to a couple of minutes per sample, and auto-samplers enabled these systems to run 24 hours a day. And you really only needed one Phd Chemist to configure a particular test, commit it to code, after which tech-level analysts could do much of the work just executing the program and configuration the Chemist had created.
Did this result in mass unemployment in highly skilled Chemists? Nope. Instead a single well paid chemist could (with an equipment budget and some help from techs) output hundreds of thousands of analyses a week. This drove down the cost of chemical analysis making it affordable in places it had never been before. Demand exploded due to the lower cost. More and more analytical chemistry labs started popping up. We were testing everything from water to food to crime scenes to medical tests that previously had been cost prohibitive. It even allowed a whole new industries in Biotech and Pharma to blossom in ways they previously couldn't have without the access to affordable and quick analytical QC.
Demand for highly skilled chemists surged. Their work was a little different now than it had been in the past. The fact that they were not manually packing columns and monitoring sensitive equipment allowed them to focus more time on where they truly added value, the brain work. Demand for analytical QC technicians to maintain and run the equipment also surged. Demand for the equipment surged, resulting in a surge in demand for everyone involved in manufacturing of the equipment as well.
Now, this is definitely a "best case" scenario for what AI will be able to do for us. In this case there were very few downsides. Very few people actually lost their jobs. Their jobs just changed, and they were in even greater demand over time.
With AI there will likely be pain as the market adjusts. Many people will likely lose their jobs and find that they no longer have the requisite skills to fill the positions that are now required to make a good living in the new market. And that sucks. We need to be prepared for that, and be much better at retraining people for future employment and keeping people from losing their homes than we have been traditionally or we are going to have HUGE societal problems.
Once we come through on the other side though, the economy will likely be even stronger than it is today with workers doing even better than they are today. This has been the case every single time technological advancement has upended any job market. The industrial revolution, computers, automated technology, etc. etc. These things were all difficult when they were new, and caused lots of people harm, but once we got through to the other side they changed our society in ways we could otherwise never have had, raising our standard of living by making products and services that were previously impossible (or at least impossible for normal people who weren't wealthy) possible for almost everyone.
I wouldn't want to go back to a pre-computer world, or a pre-industrial revolution world. And I'm sure in 50 years time the people living in an AI normitive world will feel the same way, and not want to go back to the way things were before.
Getting there will be difficult through, and I worry a little about this.
I also worry that we will wind up trusting AI too much in the interim, allowing it to make bad decisions for us that cause engineering disasters or financial crises, before we learn the hard wauy the types of controls and reviews we will need to have on the technology. (because - as a species - we always seem to need to learn the hard way)
The most difficult adjustment - at least in the U.S. will likely be the political one. In a market where marketable skills are likely to change very fast, and more and more of the ability to sustain a living will come from the ownership of the AI systems we may be forced into seriously rethinking our free market models. We are going to need
vastly expanded social safety nets both to help people survive without losing their homes when their skillsets inevitably become obsolete AND to train and prepare them for the next needed skill that industry needs. If we don't, we will likely head for a combination of poverty and malaise, and industries screaming for talent they can't find.
This new society behooves everyone to drop their old political left/right biases and be open to a new way of equitably sharing the proceeds of the productivity of mankind. I don't claim to have the right answer of how that should work, but I do know that if we do nothing we will fail. And I don't have any confidence at all that people will be able to overcome these traditional political biases in ordser to adapt our society to the mostly inevitable future.
