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.

Now, let us continue Musk's suggestion of a universal income system, a concept often proposed as a solution to potential mass unemployment caused by AI. This system would provide every individual with a regular, unconditional payment, regardless of employment status, ensuring that everyone has a basic level of financial security. However, who would fund this income for people who do not work or have nothing to exchange?

In a world where states become obsolete, social order becomes a necessity. Only corporations, with their financial resources, can restore or maintain order. In such a world, control of humanity may be automated by a small chip, as Musk imagines, planted in our brains to control us through a central authority. Then, we will find ourselves in remotely controlled mass digital imprisonment, the early glimpse we have already observed in China's current social credit system.

Fourthly, when there is no labour for us, we will face monumental difficulties in finding meaning in our lives. Meaning is deeply intertwined with labour, enabling people to insert their values and efforts into things, objects, and products to humanise their world. Employment gives individuals a societal status, an identity, and a sense of pride and purpose. Without labour, human beings become something akin to "useless eaters," significantly losing our human identity.

Meaning is also embedded in our sense of ownership-ownership of property and things, giving us a proper place in society, achievement, control, and happiness. If we lose this private ownership, we all will become a collective nobody, owned by corporations, by losing all our freedoms, dignity, and self-worth. Humanity will be reduced to almost nothing in this AI-generated gigantic machine, running its course independently of human intervention and by the will of an extremely few elite corporation owners.

Simultaneously, people may be massively bored with living in a dreamy, virtual world where they are exposed to endless entertainment and propaganda shows to get the programmed pleasure of feeling alive-to kill time instead of killing themselves.

The future shaped by AI is unprecedented, dangerous, and apocalyptic, considered from any angle of human imagination. At worst, it is the end of humanity or the re-engineering of humanity into a new species, left with only animalistic functions, such as eating, sleeping, and having sex with a robot.

Fundamentally, what is the point of keeping humanity alive or being a human with no function to be desired or skills to be used meaningfully?

Still worse, the current discussion about AI only focuses on its advantages, which are used as a dangling carrot before us, without showing us its sinister side. Such a grim vision of our future is not drawing serious attention from politicians worldwide, particularly in Australia, which is coming to an election. No politician mentions this as part of their campaigns despite this change happening in their next term of government. It is scarier to elect a new government with no clue or pretentious silence about this structural change accelerating our demise at lightning speed.

My ultimate question remains: Why do we need AI if it only offers limited short-term benefits while permanently taking over everything, making us human-our intelligence, emotions, capabilities, and possibilities-to become slave-like cyborgs? Is the efficiency that AI misleadingly claims to provide truly worth sacrificing our humanity? Qui bono, in the end?