Replacement Theory

As you have likely heard me talk about several times before, the economy is a scam. It is set up to fail, going through engineered boom and bust cycles, where people's lives are impacted based on what the financial markets are doing, even if it has no bearing on general supply and demand. Jobs are lost because of the financial situation, but at a practical level, nothing much has generally changed in what humans need.

However, I think that a lot of people have applied this same boom and bust cycle of the economy, combined with lessons from past changes in industry, to what will happen with the impacts of artificial intelligence on society. Many think that like the industrial revolution, people will move into new job types, like the shift from physical to knowledge work over the last hundred and fifty years. And of course, those that lose their jobs will eventually be absorbed into the new workforce.

"Past performance is no guarantee of future results."

I think that this is a limited understanding of the difference of what has happened and what is happening now and what could happen in the future. Moving from physical to knowledge work was possible, because humans were able to adapt to knowledge work positions. However, once in the current state of knowledge as a skill, we have nowhere to evolve to. In the past, the general skill-based jobs that were lost first were those in the less-skilled areas, those places that were repetitive and could be standardized and automated. As a result, there has been a massive amount of optimization that has taken place.

Now though, any job that has a lot of standardized rules, can essentially be performed by a narrow artificial intelligence with an if that, then this process. For example, Finland has very formalized tax laws, which means there is essentially a book of law that covers every aspect of tax expectations. It won't be long until an AI indexes that book and an individual or a company can essentially just feed in the transaction history and the AI will do all the calculations and submissions, in a split second. No accounts needed. Similarly, a lot of legal conditions like contract law will be automated, comparing conditions, factoring in governmental law, and red-flagging anything that is out of place, or that could have multiple meanings. Lawyers aren't required.

This might sound like good news, because what is essentially happening is that a lot of the middleman services that process or translate activity across contexts, like business practices into tax obligations, will disappear. But, pretty much every modern job has some level of repetition, some level of admin, some level of codified practice that could be automated. The argument is that it frees up the time of the knowledge worker to spend on other activities, but the reality is, that if a person can reduce the time spent on repetitive work by an hour a day, a team of eight, becomes a team of seven. Business practices aren't in the habit of keeping people employed, just because those people need a job in order to feed their family.

This reduction from eight to seven might not sound like much, but it is almost fifteen percent and some roles will be more heavily impacted, or disappear entirely. This means that significant portions of the working population will find themselves unemployed, unable to maintain their current lifestyles or cover their debt obligations, and add more burden on already struggling social services.

It is untenable.

Business and government aren't designed to improve wellbeing, except through the lens of economic activity. A government can do all it needs to increase something like gross domestic product and build an extremely wealthy economic situation, but have the majority of people unable to survive without support. This is because the economy and wellbeing aren't tied together, yet we are told over and over that if we can make more wealth in the country, people will be better off. This is not true, because a company could be almost 100% automated and generate massive amounts of wealth, yet not benefit the people at all. And, no business is in the business of wealth sharing because they could increase the wellbeing of humans.

We spend a lot of time talking economics and politics, yet we don't seem to spend much time considering why these systems exist and what kind of impact they should be making on the entire ecosystem. From the narrow micro view, a single business entity has the goal of maximizing shareholder wealth, but at the macro view, what does that mean for society? A government might be voted in by the people, but when you ask the average person what the role of government is, they don't really have much to answer.

Try it.

Ask yourself. There is an election coming in the US soon and people are talking about all kinds of "important" aspects and perspectives of it, without knowing what the fundamental point is. They might have their personal opinion, but this is like being the stakeholder of a tiny company trying to maximize wealth. What are the implications at scale and how does it affect the entire ecosystem? What does it mean in ten, twenty or fifty years from now if the continually improve AI (at a rate no human can match) ends up doing everything for us?

What many don't realize is that nature itself is a rule-based, codified system. We don't consider this because there is a huge amount of complexity, but the most complex problem becomes simple to solve repeatedly once a viable solution is found. Nature is complex, because we just don't have all the insight we would need into every part of it. But it is actually just very, very complicated.

This distinction might not matter to many, but it is important to make and realize that what seemed complicated before to the point that an AI would never be able to do it, was in fact complicated and now AIs are churning out the solutions in fractions of seconds. Complexity, was complication. This also means that we as humans, who seem so complex, are actually just a set of very complicated conditions. Yet, it is also pretty clear that we are also simple in the sense that our needs are pretty base, with physical requirements, sexual requirements, and emotional requirements that need to be considered in order to have what we would consider a quality life, a high level of wellbeing.

What is strange is that we keep making systems that ignore these needs and instead favor creating systems and indicators of success that do not tie themselves to even our minimum requirements, let alone to build the conditions for us to thrive as humans and then by extension, as society. If we were to look at our processes and results based on the idea that we are tasked with improving wellbeing in our own lives and at a general level, we would say that our systems are broken, and we are failing to meet the desired results.

If we were an appliance - we'd be replaced.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]