Friends,
AI — artificial intelligence — could describe Trump and Putin. Neither of them seems to possess the real thing. They’re dangerous automatons, playing the carve-up-the-world game that went out of style 80 years ago.
But today I don’t want to talk about them. I’d rather talk about AI itself, because it’s real and it’s coming at us at extraordinary speed. Both Trump and Putin will be in the ash heap of history before long. AI is just getting started.
I live a few miles away from the heart of where it’s being devised, and that heart has no beat. I ask questions of the people working on it, who tell me they’ve signed away their rights to even talk about it. Their silence feels menacing.
But I know about the job market, and I know that AI will have an effect on jobs larger than technological automation.
Essentially, there are three kinds of jobs: making, thinking, and caring.
People who make stuff used to be called “manufacturing” workers. Trump thinks we’re still back in the 1950s when those jobs paid well, and says he’s trying to create more of them with his half-assed import taxes (tariffs). He’s dead wrong.
Even if such jobs were not outsourced to Southeast Asia or Mexico, America will generate very few of them because they’re mostly automated. Go into any modern manufacturing plant remaining in the U.S. and you’ll see far more numerically controlled machine tools and robots than people.
And they pay shit because manufacturing workers no longer have strong unions behind them (the few that remain in America are now in non-union states).
That leaves thinking and caring jobs.
We’re now living in a two-tiered economy consisting of high-paid thinking jobs and low-paid caring jobs.
But AI will automate most thinking jobs — lawyers, doctors, financiers, architects, data analysts, journalists, computer scientists, engineers, videographers, and the rest of knowledge work. It will even automate much scientific research.
We’ll still need some thinkers to install, upgrade, and repair AI, of course, but I expect these jobs to be a fraction of current thinking jobs. And we’ll still have an even smaller group of thinkers who own and run AI.
That will leave caring jobs, whose very essence is human — child care and elder care workers, nurses, psychotherapists, physical therapists, massage therapists, social workers, counselors, teachers, and everyone else in the empathy business.
AI can imitate empathy and possibly fool some people into believing they’re being cared for, even loved, but it cannot genuinely empathize. It can’t touch someone’s emotions because it cannot honestly touch. It cannot fulfill the deep human desire for authentic connection to another human being because it is not human.
What does this mean for the jobs of the future — jobs you might be doing a decade from now or your children will almost certainly be doing in 20 years?
They will mostly be doing caring work. But because the demand for this work isn’t likely to increase nearly as much as will the supply of caring workers, the typical pay of caring workers is likely to decline.
If nothing is done to change this trajectory, the vast majority of Americans will be paid very little while the small group who own and run AI will make vast fortunes.
Put this reality together with the fact that the owners and runners of AI systems will be able to generate misinformation at a scale and speed that outpaces any attempt to correct it — they already are — and it’s easy to come up with a dystopian nightmare.
Which is why now is the time to put AI under the control of the people. If not now, it may never be.
This post has been syndicated from Robert Reich, where it was published under this address.