Who is afraid of AI?

The rapid and unsettling rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an urgent issue that demands our immediate attention. The message is clear and ominous: AI is set to automate many jobs, a reality already unfolding in industries such as health care, customer service, banking and finance, retail, construction, transportation, and manufacturing. It is not a distant future scenario but an evolving reality.

We will explore two pivotal predictions in depth here, pushing them to their limits and considering their potential societal implications, which could reshape our world as we know it.

At a Viva Technology conference in 2024, Elon Musk made a stark prediction that due to AI, "probably none of us will have a job, which is not necessarily bad," suggesting the need for a universal income system.

Secondly, in more concrete terms, Goldman Sachs, a leading global investment bank, has recently estimated that three hundred million jobs could be displaced or replaced with AI by 2030 globally, accounting for 18% of work hours worldwide.

The first point to consider is AI's relentless progression, which is considered the future of all technological developments. AI may not immediately replace some industries or jobs involving creativity, complexity, imagination, and emotions. However, its self-learning and self-improvement capabilities are gradually being developed to dominate these areas. The scariest examples of this are AI companion apps like Replika, which simulate personal relationships through "human-like" conversations.

The paradigmatic shift happens when AI replaces human intelligence, making knowledge-based education and self-learning redundant. As an example, if human intelligence is replaced by AI hypothetically at 20%, currently increasing a further 10% year on year till having full capabilities as humans do within 10 years, then what is the purpose for the next generations to learn as AI will have all the information we need? How do we stimulate human brains, which thrive on consistent movement, new challenges, varied ideas, and limitless imaginations for growth, if we already have AI to do things for us? In addition, human intelligence, particularly creativity, will only improve AI, potentially making itself unnecessary-ironically eventuating a perfect and wilful suicide.

Secondly, the potential replacement of AI will significantly change and finally make redundant the human workforce-mass unemployment will emerge. No nation can avoid it, negatively impacting the working class worldwide. The result will be unprecedented and unimaginable numbers of homeless, hungry, sick, and desperate people, requiring their governments to take care of them.

The critical problem is that people will have no jobs; therefore, they pay no taxes, further making the state go bankrupt and unable to exist, let alone help the homeless, hungry, and sick. Accordingly, money disappears from our lives as a medium of exchange as there is nothing to exchange. Usually, labour is exchanged for payment, creating a means for people to live independently on many levels; some may rent a house, others own a house or several houses, and invest in stocks, bonds, and other things to progress in society. In an AI-dominant world, no human labour is needed for the first time.

An AI-dominant world is ironically worse than a communist world, as Marx envisioned, where labour, at least, becomes life's prime want rather than a mere means of survival. In an AI world, where labour disappears from the human world, how do people receive their basic needs and from whom? Indeed, who decides what the people's needs are?

In the AI world, the class division will not disappear as Marx proposed but intensify dramatically. The widening gap between the wealthy elite and the rest of humanity could potentially lead to a collapse or a reset of societal structures.

Thirdly, the most powerful corporations, including Black Rock, Vanguard, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Alphabet, will continue controlling the world's wealth, including property assets, agriculture, IT technologies, and medical services. This control will quickly put them in a domineering position of advancing and controlling AI technology. As such, whoever controls AI will control the world.

As the states wither away, corporations will assume all control and ownership. The World Economic Forum famously predicted in 2016 that we would own nothing and be happy, a grand vision for a communist "utopia." As corporations become financially powerful to replace the states, the AI takeover could further embolden them to regulate and control the basics of human existence and survival.