My dear friend and once my roommate at University of Florida, Gainesville, where we both were in the grad school, Dr. Kiran Garimella (an early PhD in AI back in early 1990s) has written this illuminating piece about job losses due to to AI.
Below is a short excerpt.
Click the link at the end to read the whole article.
Short Excerpt
AI will cause enormous job losses, but that is nothing compared to the loss of meaning in traditional work and virtue of duty-bound toil. This will force people to re-examine their motivations for work. Would you get up in the morning and do something for your own sake, for your own pleasure and passion, when you don’t have to do so to feed yourself?
What will you do when you don’t have to?
Many people will be unpleasantly shocked to find they have no passion. For them, AI spells debilitating inertia, deepening despair, and the slide into apathy. A happy group (hopefully, more than a few) will look upon this as a golden opportunity to get rid of the shackles of work they must do so they can do work they want to do.
The AI revolution will be eclipsed by the revolution caused by decoupling jobs from work and by moving from “I work, therefore I live” to “I live, therefore I work.” Sociologists will be forced to re-examine and re-formulate their models of human interaction and organization. Economists will be forced to re-think incentives and agency relationships. Politicians will be forced to invent new rhetoric for their platforms when the traditional political posturings will become moot. Schools will be forced to contend with a deschooled society (in the sense of Ivan Illich’s “Deschooling Society“).
Society as a whole must then grapple with the deeper social, economic, and psychological ramifications of permanent net job losses caused by AI. In consolation, the loss of jobs without (optimistically) loss of lifestyle should give us the time and freedom to think about these issues. Perhaps we can even debate the nature of intelligence as it applies to artificial intelligence.
If all this pans out as I think it will and should, this is quite a good impact of artificial intelligence on natural intelligence; we have nothing to fear but to be prepared for the transition itself!
The full article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2018/08/07/job-loss-from-ai-theres-more-to-fear/
Know Thyself 