3am musings on the future of mankind

I woke up in the wee hours with the horrible realisation that what we’re all living through now is likely how the late modern people felt at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

I mean, we’re worried now about the rise of AI, how it’s going to put us out of work and people are going to suffer, just like people were worried about mechanisation, which led to the Luddites smashing equipment in Nottingham in the 1800s.

AI in the workplace

In my work as an administrator I can see a few areas that I can currently make use of AI tools: taking notes in meetings and disseminating them quickly afterwards, automating repetitive tasks and the like. And I do exactly that. I’m a sucker for coming up with creative ways to make my workload more manageable, but I have found that it scares some managers because they either feel threatened that they will be left behind, or that they don’t understand the processes behind it.

In my last job I found that I could create and run queries on the finance system which automatically ran a report on the cost centres I wanted to follow, and from there I set up an automation to have it emailed to me overnight, and a further workflow saved the email attachment and overwrote the previous day’s report. This meant when I opened my spreadsheet I could guarantee (report failures notwithstanding) that my finance data on research grants was as up to date as it could possibly be. This was a fairly simple thing to do, but my manager didn’t like it and wanted me to go back to the manual way of pulling out the data which honestly took hours longer simply because the query took so long to run.

But this is nothing compared to how AI could do this and other tasks that I was being paid nearly £18 per hour to do, and it would do it for free.

I think that the rise of AI is more threatening though than the rise of mechanisation, because it doesn’t seem to me that any checks and balances are being placed on AI creators and I can see Terminator style of dystopian situations in our future.

Universal Basic Income

In the early days we were being told that if AI took our jobs we’d receive a Universal Basic Income and wouldn’t even have to get jobs (not that there would be many left for humans to do), but how would that even work? The only way I can see this working is that the companies using AI to replace humans would have to pay money to someone for the higher profits, and the only place they could pay to would be the Treasury. I can count on no hands how many companies would want to pay higher taxes to the government so that the government could pay the people to live wild and free. They already complain about paying tax as it is and do anything to avoid paying it (legally, of course).

I think that humans are too selfish to have an egalitarian society like this, but if this dystopia ever happened, who is to say that humans would be in charge of those businesses anyway? Wouldn’t the CEOs and other highly paid executives become a victim to coding that could replace them and their decision making ‘skills’ so they would be left jobless like the rest of us. Humans would be left to scavenge for a living, with automatons policing our every move in case we rose up against them.

Heck, I’ve even used AI to generate the images in this blog instead of paying a human to do it…

Sweet dreams.