It seems like this blog is turning into a pace of doomerism which isn’t my intention. I want to tease out all the different angles of everything that is happening, and to find the good, the hope, the responsible parties looking out for those that are becoming increasingly powerless. I am struggling to see many positive aspects in our society right now. In the mid-2000s when social media was seen as a tool for community building and user empowerment, today it’s rife with privacy and misinformation concerns. I remember seeing the good coming out of these tools, while I was younger and didn’t think quite as critically, I failed to really think: What could go wrong?
As far as today goes, I’m having the opposite problem: What could go right? When it comes to AI, there seem to be two trains of thought with what it’s going to look like in the short term vs. the long term. One side (seemingly some CEOs posturing that they’re innovating, reducing costs, and staying on the cutting edge) are saying AI will replace a wide swath of jobs. Is it just hype? In the other camp we have others saying AI will augment work, not replace it. Some argue that past technological shifts created more jobs than they destroyed, jobs we couldn’t have imagined in advance. Maybe this is another chapter in that pattern. But I find myself wondering: is this time different?
It’s not just the people in power. We reward speed, convenience, and cheap solutions with our wallets (I’m included in the guilty party). Ordering groceries online, using chatbots for quick answers, bypassing human workers at self-checkout. It’s hard to separate where consumer desire ends and corporate strategy begins.
In either case it doesn’t seem to me that those in charge are preparing those of us that will be left out. Like a modern age feudalism, except there’s no land for serfs to subsist on, no talk of Universal Basic Income for those who at no fault of their own will be pushed out onto the fringes in a world where being poor is a crime.
Is it bad policy? Is it a failure of imagination? Is it a case of governments always moving slower than capital?
The US, and the world at large has increasing government and consumerism debt, the US is mounting debt with no real ways to address it aside from cutting existing safety nets for those already disenfranchised, and while we might be sheltered from displacement in the short-term aside from decreases in the tech sector, what does it look like in five years or ten years?
I struggle to see the end game to all of this, at least a positive one. There are glimmers, open-source AI communities, emerging privacy laws, labor strikes pushing back… but I’m not yet convinced they can keep pace with the systemic shifts underway.