After reading various comments about the advancement of Artificial Intelligence, particularly regarding the question "When robots replace working people, how will those who become unemployed sustain their lives?", I was struck by Elon Musk's response: "There will be universal high income (not merely basic income). Everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport and everything else. Sustainable abundance."
To me, this
is simply Musk's gibberish… trying to sell us a future utopia when he's
currently recognised for overexploiting his workforce. He wants to sell us greener
pastures when what's coming is a great calamity.
In the
reactions, someone expressed concern about the lack of preparation amongst the
current workforce, especially for less specialised workers. For me, the concern
should be general, as several voices are already saying that studying Medicine,
Law, Accounting, or Systems Engineering will be futile, since AI will perform
these jobs better. Today, we can already see this impact particularly in IT
teams, with declining salaries and job opportunities.
There are
optimists who argue that AI will elevate and complement humans in their work, it's
not a replacement but an enhancer. Within the capitalist system we live in,
this makes no sense, especially when an AI becomes more capable than a human...
why keep the human in the equation? It's as if they had invented the tractor
but only used it to assist farmers when they grew too tired to plough by hand.
I don't
intend to take a Luddite stance. It would be futile to fight against this
change, just as it was during the Industrial Revolution. The problem now is
that whilst the Industrial Revolution replaced humans and horses in terms of
strength, speed, and precision, the current revolution threatens creativity,
thinking, analysis... even empathy, evidenced in videos and articles about
robots being employed in care homes. Many find this sad, but for me it would be
ideal if I ever reached a state where my mind doesn't function well, where I
need to be changed and washed, and where others have to deal with my irregular
emotional states due to illness. I'd prefer a robot to deal with me in that
state rather than impose that burden on another human being, much less a family
member.
This leads
me to think that humans are becoming the "god of the gaps,"
constantly retreating to supposedly sacred territories that AI cannot touch.
We're desperately trying to deny that AI will replace us by clinging to our
empathy, creativity, talent, resourcefulness, our SOUL, whatever quality we can
grasp to reaffirm that our creation cannot replace us entirely.
But history
shows us how this story unfolds. We claimed machines could never play chess
like a human, or recognise faces, or understand language, or replicate the
finesse of a hand, or create art. Each time, we moved the goalposts of what
makes us uniquely human. Now we're making our final stand on consciousness,
emotion, and the ineffable spark of creativity.
Yet even as
I write this, AI systems are composing music that moves us to tears, writing
poetry that captures the human condition, and demonstrating what appears to be
empathy in therapeutic settings. We keep insisting that these are mere
simulations, hollow mimicry without true understanding. But perhaps this
insistence reveals more about our need to feel special than about any
fundamental limitation of artificial intelligence.
The tragedy
isn't that AI might replace us in these final bastions of humanity. The tragedy
is that we've built an economic system where human worth is measured solely by
productive output, where being replaced means becoming worthless. We've created
a world where technological advancement, which should liberate us to pursue
meaning beyond labour, instead threatens our very survival.
Maybe the
real question is whether we can develop a system that values human beings
regardless of their productive capacity, along with an artifact that surely
will excel in any human field beyond any of our dreams. Perhaps a new god with
undetectable gaps.
Text
enhanced with Claude.ai
