The god of the gaps: When AI Replaces Us

 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