How I Find Positivity in AI’s Taking of Jobs

Within our
Unsupervised Learning Community
we had an interesting discussion last week. One of our members said—and I’m
paraphrasing here:

I know I’m supposed to be happy about all this AI innovation, but all it
does is make me sad.

I responded by saying something like:

I feel like that too sometimes, but it reminds me to lean in to building and
sheparding people into the positive version. Because the negative version
would be bad.

A different member then responded with:

What’s the positive? That we will have survived while the other 80% lost
their jobs?

This is an important point that gave me a lot of pause. I responded in the
thread and we had a long discussion there, and I’ve now turned my response
into this essay below.

—

The reason I can see “positive” in any of this is that I think it’s kind of
the wrong question.

The question assumes we have the option of maintaining the past. If the
question is,

“Which would you prefer, the ability for humans to resist technology and
keep working their old jobs where they spend 8 hours a day moving paperwork
around, and they’re paid barely enough to raise a family, or new AI-driven
world where most of those jobs go away?”

❝  

Part of our anxiety with AI comes from the belief that we’re choosing the
wrong option. But we’re not choosing anything; it’s just happening.

I think a lot of people will say, yes, let’s keep those jobs. At least it’s
better than nothing. But that’s not the choice we have.

AI is coming not because we’re choosing it. We didn’t choose reading. We
didn’t choose the internet. We didn’t choose smartphones. And we aren’t
choosing AI. These things are simply happening. It’s the illusion of
choosing or rejecting the future that’s producing anxiety, or at least, it’s
exacerbating it.

The stoic option we have (not in the emotionless sense, but in the true
Stoicism sense) is to accept inevitability and find the maximum number of
ways to benefit from it. In this case, I think the benefits are clear.

We are being prompted to move past a world in which we spend 8 hours a
day doing what David Graeber called “Bullshit Jobs.”

We’re transitioning into a situation where the silliness of spending all
this time (most of our important waking hours) doing things in the service
of capitalism and money, becomes obvious.

There’s a lot of good that came from Capitalism, for sure, and it continues
to help lift people out of poverty. But it’s not sustainable for a
human-centric lifestyle going forward, and especially after AI.

People only have jobs in the capitalist model because capitalism needs them
to have those jobs. Capitalism, i.e., capitalism’s temporary need for human
workers, is the only reason we’ve had all these jobs all this time.

❝  

AI is a Capitalism Optimizer. It will push for the minimum number of jobs
required to deliver the good or service.

Put another way, if capitalism only needs 2 people to run a 200,000 person
business, capitalism will pressure naturally to get to that magic number of
2 people. That’s not a human system. That’s a capitalist system. And AI is
simply allowing capitalism to optimize.

What we need is a human-based system that doesn’t collapse based on
capitalism becoming even more efficient. That means human flourishing based
on human strengths. Love. Connection. Human relationships. Sharing.
Collaboration. Joint Creation Projects. And ultimately a human-centric
world.

So, to give a short version of this very long answer, the benefit of 80%
of jobs going away due to AI is that it reveals the underlying flawed
nature of what we had before. And it allows us to start building, and
transitioning to, something much better.

Yes, 100%. The transition is going to be horribly nasty. But here’s the
thing. Mindset matters. We have a choice of seeing this as the loss of a
great and wonderful thing, and the transition to a dystopian hellhole, or
seeing it as a 100% inevitable transition from a capitalism-centered world
to a human-centered world.

We will experience 100X the trauma by interpreting it as the loss of a
perfect, beautiful thing vs. seeing it as the loss of David Graeber’s
Bullshit Jobs. So let’s do that one. This is what I mean when I say lean
into it. See the positive of the other side. Look towards it. And strap in,
because it’s going to be really tough.

But I think it’s our job, for people like us, to help people see the
positive narrative and not the negative one. Because that distinction makes
the difference between experiencing temporary struggle in service of an
extraordinary positive, vs. experiencing a horrifically traumatic and
negative experience akin to the death of humanity.