Will AI make us all unemployable?

 

Concept and prompt by Vipin Labroo; illustration generated using OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Is AI a Frankenstein's monster which threatens to devour its creator by taking away their ability to earn a living? Is it a genie with potentially irreversible destructive tendencies that can never be reined in or stuffed back into the bottle that we released it from? Is it going to mark the end of the careers  of the educated young with degrees who view a white-collar job as their passport to success and a good life? With as many as 71 million young people not being able to find the right kind of job worldwide because of  the rapid expansion in the use of AI across businesses, organisations and industries, will we not see a worsening of an already bad situation? The gravity of this state of affairs can be gauged by the fact that according to UN DESA data, the global population will reach 9 billion by 2050, 6 billion of whom will be of working age.

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So are we looking at a ticking time bomb with regard to the future  employment prospects  for the educated young who had  hitherto been assured of decent employment? Will profit focused businesses and corporations preferring super efficient AI in place of slow, inefficient and plodding human workers lead to people of working age increasingly being rendered unemployable? What sort of a future are the young people really looking at?

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Going by how technological upheavals have been managed by people down the ages, it does seem that ultimately we will take AI in our stride and leverage it to advance humans to a much better way of living than before. But the trouble with AI is that it is well on its way to work autonomously of human oversight and even take decisions of its own volition, which may possibly make it do  what it sees as being in its own best interest and not that of the people it is supposed to serve. This is something that has not escaped the attention of experts, social scientists, industry doyens, civil society and governments around the world. There is already much talk about regulating AI and putting stringent safety measures in place.

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It is not surprising, therefore, that a minimum of 72 countries around the world have come forward with more than a thousand AI-related policy initiatives as well as legal guardrails to assuage the people's concerns and worries pertaining to AI. 

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Preventing AI from setting the employment agenda

It is important to understand and appreciate the fact that AI, no matter how sophisticated, is after all no more than a set of productivity technologies and tools meant to serve human needs and not the vested interests of anyone or anything at the cost of depriving people of their livelihood. Rather than ensuring employment for AI at the cost of the human workforce, one has to ensure that AI enhances and empowers the latter to grow and flourish.

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The economy is run as a pact between capitalists and the workforce to have a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship that serves both of their interests.. Any rupture of this compact on account of business owners edging out workers and making huge profits in the process cannot bode well for society.

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Fortunately or unfortunately for total AI take over votaries, there is a limit to how capable it is to completely perform every known function performed by real people and perform it substantially better than them. For one, the cost of large scale implementation of AI is prohibitive for most organisations and businesses. Second, one may talk about Agentic AI and all that; but there isn't enough trust in the technology and its ability to work well autonomously and with minimal supervision. So, there is this requirement of having to create a whole new class of workers to help supervise and manage these new fangled technologies.

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One cannot also rule out the possibility of the massive hype surrounding AI having created this huge bubble which could burst and end up tarnishing the image of AI as a knight in shining armour slated to transform human destiny, hopefully for the better.

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History is a great teacher and it tells us that mighty empires come and go and every once in a while a great new technology dazzles the world for some time. Our home, the planet Earth, meanwhile continues to spin on its axis and another epoch changes. The more the world changes, the more it remains the same.

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