About AI Drama
A story about the times when humanity has reinvented itself...
Hello there!
Welcome to another edition of Algorithmically Speaking.
I wrote this small essay a couple of months ago. You know, when AI Drama was at its peak…
I wanted to share this small piece with you and hear your thoughts about the whole “AI is going to take away our jobs” situation.
Read, share, and comment with your opinions below.
Enjoy!
The emergence of new tools based on artificial intelligence is raising concerns among an increasing number of people. Many wonder how much their already precarious jobs will last, which professions will disappear, and which areas of the economy will be most vulnerable to these new invaders.
And we should indeed be concerned, but to what extent?
Throughout our existence, we have constantly faced dilemmas like this. Just think of how Gutenberg's printing press took the 15th century by storm. Some predicted the loss of collective memory, as everything was now written on paper, and no one would remember anything to pass on to the next generations.
But what happened?
Indeed, minstrels gradually faded away, and by the early 16th century, they practically did not exist. But in their place, other trades and businesses related to printing emerged, which absorbed much of the surplus labor force.
Also, the number of people learning to read increased substantially, and the collective knowledge was put on much more permanent support than the human brain.
A similar phenomenon was the industrial revolution that occurred in 18th-century England. It brought changes in the economic and social structure, causing a massive exodus of rural workers to large cities, with the consequent precariousness of their living conditions.
However, we moved from a stagnant economy based on subsistence agriculture, artisanal production, and limited trade to a more dynamic one that guaranteed sustained growth. Just like with the printing press, jobs disappeared, but others emerged and absorbed the surplus labor force created in the process.
For much of the 20th century, especially after the disastrous wars in that humanity was involved, we saw an accelerated growth of these phenomena, now associated with computing. It is no secret that it has rapidly and unstoppably penetrated all spheres of society.
For years, the images of Chaplin's "Modern Times" became history in many factories as employees were replaced by automated robots that tirelessly performed the most tedious and dangerous tasks in the production sector.
Undoubtedly, it is a process not exempt from pain, where many people have had to reinvent themselves to move forward. Ancestral family traditions have disappeared, those where children learned their parents' trade and continued it from generation to generation.
Still, humanity has been able to overcome this process and benefit from its surplus production.
Today, when the threshold of the future is the morning of the next day, where we need to be faster, more accurate, and more timely, AIs appear, and panic begins, as if collective memory had been lost after Gutenberg's printing press. New tools present new challenges, which we must resolve with everyone's effort.
Let us stop to analyze just one of the benefits:
One benefit of these tools is the possibility of freeing up a large number of qualified personnel and channeling them into areas where humanity has made little progress, such as combating diseases and researching the cosmos or the brain.
An important, albeit distant question, is how we will face the long-time anticipated destruction of the solar system when our sun ceases to exist. How much of the qualified labor force will be necessary to solve this crucial problem?
How many resources will be needed to implement possible solutions?
I leave you with those thoughts in mind. Let me know what you think about this topic, and let's start a fruitful discussion.
Leave a comment with what you think are the most important problems humanity will have to solve in the near future.
As always, if you think this post provides value for someone you know, share it with them. Nothing will make me happier.
See you next week 👋,
Alberto
Loved your phrasing here:
"Today, when the threshold of the future is the morning of the next day"
Very nicely written post, I enjoyed it a lot. Lots to think about!
Humanity should not be surprised by the appearance of these tools. These ideas are being worked on since the 50s of the last century. Everyone remembers the conference organized by John McCarthy in 1956, where the term "artificial intelligence" was coined for the first time, so it was a matter of time before it materialized. But the important thing is to understand the panic they have caused, forgetting humanity's ability to solve similar or more complex problems. Alberto in this article reminds us of this and conveys the hope that although the challenges are great, we will know how to solve them.
As the great Jorge Luis Borges said
The future is not what will happen, but what we are going to do