The world debates Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) effects on the socioeconomic system, either good or bad, no in between or indifference. As usual, comments depend upon bias and agenda. Selected facts, opinions posed as facts, and made for consumption stories guide the wary to weariness, complicated by the subjective interpretations from the readers. The divide is complete, with no middle ground; the Luddites see mass unemployment and economic breakdown and the entrepreneurs see less overhead and vast profits. A segment of society is concerned with the human experience, controls, and the social, moral, and ethical changes that the evolving AI will bring to society. They ask for a slowed pace and government regulation.
AI is an invisible force to which people cannot contend. Visible are the vast Data Centers, which house the hardware that contains the data that provide the patterns for training the models and operating AI. The stark, monotonous, and fenced Data Centers occupy acres of land, drain water resources, and elevate local energy prices. They have their adversaries, but the monster Data Centers are only a side effect service to the dislocations AI will visit upon humanity. I do not say this with authority and with observation from my experiences.
Wanting to change the cover of a novel I wrote, The Victory, AI pushed me to seek the services of an illustrator. Not desiring the cost and hassle with working with an illustrator, I asked my son, who has expertise in graphic arts, if he could do the design. I sent him a preliminary outline with images and, in a few minutes, he returned a finished cover. It still needed work and he suggested I do what he had already done and would continue to do ─ go to AI, and suggest my needs.
I already had limited experience with AI, using it for many purposes, never with my substack writings, and in order to gain understanding of difficult subjects, resolve maintenance problems, and clarify mistakes in the novel — historical, geographical, grammatical, redundant, spelling and punctuation that Word spelling and grammar did not capture. Without going into detail, finalizing the cover for publication involved minimal effort and correspondence with Claude AI. I estimated Claude, and its amiable manner, saved me $2000, several hours of time, and a positive reduction in aggravation. Here are the covers; the image on the left is the previous cover, which took me days to design. The new one on the right took several hours.
I concluded it is more credible to obtain personal experience with AI and determine its effects from a real life situation. This real life situation demonstrated the need for Illustrators would greatly diminish, and so will other occupations that depend upon research and summarize the efforts. Only needed will be a few people that provide services for those unable or unwilling to perform the activity themselves, and a few to check results. In the former labors, the workers will use AI, greatly shortening the personal effort involved; one worker replacing the efforts of several others. I can visualize Amazon AI taking an Internet order, relaying it to its AI companion, who will send the order to a selected vendor or warehouse, an AI driven machines retrieving the product, packaging, addressing, and shipping it by either drone or a self-driven truck, and delivering to destination by a small robotic machine.
Permit the established mind to leap into identifying other occupations diminished in intensity by transference to AI and we have clerks, public relations, lawyers, doctors, software engineers, architects, graphic arts, publishing, teachers, and a host of other occupations. Add combining AI with numerical control of machinery and robots and the list of threatened workers of all types — professional, service, clerical, and manual —increases dramatically. As of today, analysis does not predict an unusual decline in employment.
MIT Sloan Management School, has identified jobs that shrank:
Top-paying roles (like management analysts, aerospace engineers, and computer and information research scientists): Employment within firms fell by about 3.5% over five years. These more lucrative roles are more likely to be in firms that adopt AI; the productivity gains that those firms realize more than offset the losses. As a result, the highest-paid jobs still make up a slightly bigger share of employment than those less exposed to AI.
Business, financial, architecture, and engineering jobs: These shrank — by about 2% to 2.5% over five years — because they have a high share of tasks that match what AI can do. Among them, business and financial jobs are more exposed to AI than architecture and engineering roles, but they’re also more likely to be in firms that use AI heavily, which helps offset some of the losses.
The trend to reducing employment will occur slowly, waiting for a new generation to adapt to an AI preferable scenario. These people will be unaware that their flirtation with AI is causing economic havoc. For competitive reasons, industry will seek AI whenever it enables cost cutting, and will be unable to resist the productivity gains emerging from replacing staff rather than from seeking gains from making staff more efficient. Similar to previous technologies, effects grow slowly and, after reaching an inflection point, cascade rapidly into acceptance. The present analyses are shaped by an early stage of AI.
Previous technological advances did not reduce the labor force and shifted it to newly created and expanding industries. AI is different; the labor force contracts and has only minor replacements. AI creates a new industry of data centers and an expanding industry of chip manufacture, neither of which are labor intensive and add much to the labor force.
The descent into chaos has a happy ending; from the shambles of unused cars and abandoned homes, a new system able to understand AI’s impact and capable of adapting it for beneficial purposes. will emerge. The Capitalist system has already evolved into a welfare system and has elements of a Democratic Socialist system. AI domination in the economy will demand a managed economy and this system will allocate resources so they benefit society — Karl Marx’s interpretation of history will prove correct again — when the tools available for improving society are not used, people will rise and implement the new tools for their satisfaction.
The 40 hour work week will be reduced and workers will work in shifts of reduced time that allow all workers to be employed.
Medicare for all will become a reality. Stalled by excessive administrative costs and insufficient medical assistance to accommodate the rush of applicants, Medicare will enlist AI to sharply reduce administration, assist practitioners in research and discovery, enable patients to resolve less serious situations that do not need medical help, and guide them more carefully in their visits.
People will be in better control of their lives, having a source of unlimited information to inform and advise them.
There will be cultural, societal, and human relationship shifts and breakdowns that disturb a mass of people. That has already happened with the computer and Internet, and social media ages. The personal touch, doctor/patient relationship has been submerged by organizations that employ doctors and force them to regard the bottom line before sympathetic attachment. The inevitable cannot be stopped. People will adapt to the new society, a more placid, more controlled, less free, and robotic society that generates pleasure and reduces wants.