I’m developing some thoughts, as yet incomplete and unrefined, about Artificial Intelligence. Perhaps I should ask AI to help me write this (joking!). I approach this with just a passing understanding of the technology itself, but with some ideas coalescing around the dangers.
I recently heard a speaker say that the Luddites would have been fine with technology in the Industrial Revolution that made their jobs easier without taking their jobs away. One concern I have with AI is that it will take jobs away from people. Labor costs are usually the largest business expense, and AI reduces that in some cases, and eliminates it in others.
Technology long as promised to make our work easier, even reduce the hours we need to work, thus freeing up our time for creative or leisure pursuits. This rarely has turned out to the benefit of workers. Absent a solid, guaranteed income, it remains near impossible for workers to earn less and have the economic freedom to follow their dreams. Money saved on salaries go into company profits and the pockets of shareholders, while workers do with less or cobble together multiple jobs to stay afloat.
Loss of people-based work, especially on-site, deprives other businesses of traffic – cafes, pubs, stores, etc. AI doesn’t need to eat, drink, or socialize, so these businesses suffer and fold, putting more people out of work. This has been foreshadowed by the shuttering of offices in our city.
Much of our identity and purpose is tied to our work. When we are deprived of work, or overburdened, paradoxically, with too much work by needing multiple low-skill, low-paying jobs, our spirits suffer. Not only is there little impetus for creativity and joy, we also suffer from depression and anxiety.
And when AI begins to make more generative, human-like decisions to govern many or most aspects of our society, the human soul is robbed of its God-given gift of being co-creators. Will we lose the ability to think? Society will lose nuance, and, even more dangerously in acts of policing and warfare, we risk allowing ourselves to be destroyed.
I expect AI supporters – especially the ones with the largest financial stake in the technology – will have rebuttals to my claims, and suggest that the good will far outweigh the yet-to-be-seen bad. I shan’t be convinced.
God’s blessings and peace,
Dan+
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