AI, Jobs and the Future

We live a significant part of our adult lives working jobs, and a good chunk of that part just shuttling to and from work. For many of us, our jobs exert the majority of our life stresses, especially when we are stuck in difficult and mundane jobs we do not like.

A large amount of our time and emotions, over our lifetime, get invested into our jobs and the work we do, and that would not be so bad if it was work that came with meaning and enjoyment.

If the above statement is the reality of the majority of adult humans, then it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes along and takes these jobs away while still providing us with income and freedom.

It needs to be mentioned though, that the idea is not to live in a utopian post Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) world where humanity has an intelligent servant doing everything for us while we just wait month after month to receive our Universal Basic Income (UBI) checks.In this hypothesis, AI will raise our productivity by helping us more efficiently perform tasks that we do not have to perform ourselves, so we can move to other useful contributions to the society we are living in.

Similar: Here is how Google’s new AI tool, Gemini works

Except for the high fertility rates and growing young populations in places like Africa and India, there is a major problem of declining birth rates and growing pensioners globally. Most of the World is going to have a much smaller proportion of its population in the workforce generating income and helping run the economy.

This is a problem in the headlights for many major economies. As economic planners are expecting the aforementioned workforce decline to affect modern economies around the World, AI is emerging at just the right time.

The need to earn a living is so important that we are willing to go through decades of stress and long-term fatigue to make it, and still feel lucky we are not amongst those counted in the “jobless” statistics. Even beyond earning an income, is the search for meaning. If we look at the many trade-offs we make to be at work, the time we could have spent properly raising a family and building a personal meaning for our lives, then as stated earlier, we should be excited for the emergence of AI.

AI gives us the perfect opportunity to make our kind of contribution to society. We can build meaning through AI by helping develop and improve it to serve us better, as long as we are compensated fairly.

A few projects like Theia, Athene Network and Raven Protocol have been launched aiming to implement similar ideas. The users or contributors become part owners as they gain a share of the project when they contribute to training the AI.

The goal is to provide a fairer opportunity for people contributing to making AI work for us by allowing them to have a stake in the projects they help build, and it will ultimately serve as competition to major corporations that build and train their AI models in the lab.