Daddy Needs New Shoes

Tomorrow is Father's Day in Finland, so today I got to "do what I want" which wasn't really much. All I needed to do was to find a couple pairs of shoes. One pair for the winter, and one I can wear with straight pants. I have a lot of trouble with my feet and lower legs, so the right shoes are important. Smallsteps and my wife decided to join for all of the excitement. My wife found a winter coat and Smallsteps got a lot of clothes to replace the ones that she has grown out of or they have worn through.

I still don't have shoes.

How can it be so hard? Well, there are several reasons I guess, and it isn't just because the range of men's shoes in Finland is pretty bad. I am not even fuzzy and have resigned myself to getting something pretty ugly as long as they are comfortable, but there was nothing. Nothing! I guess I am going to have to find some online and then return them when they don't fit. What a waste of time.

At least the girls had fun.

I have a week to find the dress shoes though, because I am going on a work trip for a few days to facilitate a session with a customer. It has been a long time since I have met directly with a customer because I have moved to an internal focus in the last three years, but I am looking forward to it. One of the salespeople asked me to accompany their team on the trip because they like the way I facilitate, plus I have a little bit of experience with the topic too - which is defining business use cases for artificial intelligence.

Surprised?

Kind of funny considering how negative I am about where AI is leading us as a society, and how many people think that I am a luddite who doesn't understand all the benefits of it. The reason I am negative on the future is because I have experience discovering and defining usecases in the real world for it, and I have first-hand experience on the impacts it is having on employment opportunities now. A lot of people look at these things from a theoretical standpoint, and from their limited view of their experience with something, rather than the reality of what is happening in the broader ecosystem, and where it is leading.

It doesn't affect me now, so it isn't a problem.

Right now people are looking at the types of AI that are being pushed in the mainstream media and think that it is somewhat trivial. However, where AI is actually going to impact people is that so much of the work most of us do is repetitive and codifiable. Not only that, it is also digital. This means that even if twenty percent of the work can be performed by AI, it means that one out of every five people is made redundant. Because the economy has interdependencies, employment redundancy in one area is going to impact on pretty much all other areas, as even if people could retrain (most people can't), they are still subject to supply and demand and if people aren't earning, demand decreases.

Ah, but they can just start being creators on the internet, producing more digital content for consumers. Even if they could, there wouldn't be the demand to pay them adequately enough. But, the AIs are already eating into this area at a rapid pace, and it is only the start of the generative-AI movement. Once it ramps up into more capable solutions, it is going to shift exponentially to take over every part of our society in some way.

Sucks to be unemployable.

Yes. But, even if you are employable in some area, what kind of community do you live in when unemployment is incredibly high, people are underutilized, struggling to live, struggling to find purpose, disenfranchised, disconnected, and wondering whether anything they do matters at all? You see those images of the drag-addled areas of the US in the news with people like zombies and high crime? That will likely spread.

I am not worried about some kind of Skynet taking over humanity, because before that, we will already be destroying ourselves through our daily behaviors. In some way, many people will be demanding AI takeover, because the volatility of society could get so high, that they will give up the last scraps of freedom they have, for a sense of security.

People will beg for the blue pill.

It all seems so far-fetched. Which is probably why most people don't put much stock in the dystopian future of artificial intelligence. Either that, or they choose to ignore the signs, or don't even see the signs, and therefore think that things will just go on as they have always known them to. But, if we look at how society and individual behaviors have changed in just the last couple decades, we should expect the changes to speed up.

We don't evolve in that time as humans.

We will have the same brains, the same bodies, the same weaknesses - but enter into an increasingly changing environment for which we are less suited. Unless there is a radical shift in the way we organize ourselves and the way the economy works, the vast majority of us are going to end up in a life of experiences we don't want.

People worry about nuclear war, asteroids hitting earth, pandemics and global warming. But, what I think is likely to "get us" is far more subtle and mundane than that. It is the accelerating creep of tools used to maximize profits, that substitute human abilities. Our usefulness will be eaten into, until we have nothing to do. We have not evolved to be useless, we have evolved to be creative, innovative, and growth orientated. Not some of us - all of us. When most of us no longer feel that feeling of advancement and we are unable to find a way to add value to the world, hope is lost.

Will we pivot in time?

I don't know - I can't even find shoes.

Taraz
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