“AI could replace 80% of jobs ‘in next few years’: expert”.
Okay, let’s take that possibility and run with it, and see what happens. First, people like Elon Musk and those running Google are spending huge sums, fortunes, on developing Artificial Intelligence to become capable of thinking and performing better than humans. The purpose is to replace human workers with machines operated by robot minds, AI minds, to work faster and more efficiently.
If you have a factory that makes cars, with 1000 workers you pay an average of $50,000 a year to, and replace them all with robotic machines, then once the machines are paid for, you’re saving $50 million a year minus the cost of electricity and machine maintenance.
The future is happening and the day will come when several billion human workers are replaced by AI robots. What will happen to those people? As fast as they try to find ways to make a living that don’t involve robots, robots will be created to replace them anyway. The only way for most of these people to survive is to become criminals, sex workers or have special creative skills.
I’m reminded of the Blade Runner movie, where there was a thriving underground of people engaged in criminal activity, because all the high paying jobs had been taken by “Replicants”, which were actually robots constructed of human parts and grown together in factories.
Corporations are motivated by Profit. If people are unemployed they can’t buy anything and if the population is drastically reduced, it’s the same result, profit is reduced if there’s less people to sell to. So how will the global economy be sustained?
My guess is that it will be easy if there’s a global currency. It will simply be a Welfare State. where the unemployed receive enough credits to survive and are able to buy their basic needs, because the money is all owned by the government and they can create all they want. It will all be digital so all you have to do to create a billion dollars is type the numbers into the database. The real problem will be to supply enough food for all those people, so logically the population will have to be stabilized at a level that’s easily fed and controlled.
This leads to the purpose of most of humanity becoming that of merely consumers, but that’s pretty close to where we are right now. Artificial Intelligence can free humanity from it’s labors but the end result will be to be dominated by our creation and possibly replaced by it entirely.
Other races on other planets must have faced this same predicament that Humanity is about to face but knowing their solution to it is unlikely to benefit us, since we always seem to take the roads to hell instead to progress. We spend more effort devising ways to kill each other than we have ever spent trying to become friends and allies. We fight over everything. In fact, maybe being ruled by our creation could prove to be our only salvation.