Will AI make everyone unemployed?

What is a revolution? You might be tempted to define it as the disruption of the status quo, to say that revolutions break down or destroy something that exists paving the way for something new to take its place. The problem with that definition is that it doesn't hold true when you actually look at human history. Innovation leads to new destinations, new orders, and new paradigms, revolutions do not. A revolution both in the sociological sense and in the geometric sense is basically the traversal of a circle from one point back to itself.

Revolutions throughout history have taken order in society, disrupted it, and rather than replacing it or reforming it, they ultimately return society back to that point of order - in other words revolutions, far from changing society, actually reinforce the behavioural patterns that have become entrenched.

There are many people calling the rise of AI in society a revolution that will fundamentally change our lives, some say for the better, some say for the worse, but the one thing they agree on is that the status quo won't remain. The reality I fear is that it will remain, the skin may change, the clothes may change, but the flesh, and the skeleton, the inner machinations will remain unchanged.

Capitalism is relatively new in terms of human history, various paradigms existed before it rose to the dominance it now holds, but throughout human history up until that point, from the inception of society as a concept we have been guided by 3 things: structure, delegation, and subordination.

Structure as it can be observed, is the system of laws, governance, and administration that we live under. These are not new concepts, they have existed for thousands of years, one of, if not the first legal systems ever to exist can be traced back to Sumeria some 4 thousand years ago. Laws have changed more times than we can document accurately in those 4 millennia but the concept has remained constant for all that time.

Delegation is a cornerstone of society, it separates established civilisations from hunter gatherers. Where those who lived as nomads were responsible for their own survival, the foundation of society is the delegation of our basic needs. We don't hunt and gather food, someone else does that for us, acting as producers, it is sold by service providers, and we eat the food as consumers. This basic model separating production, service, and consumption has underpinned society for thousands of years. Farming can be divided into two major branches, Subsistence and Surplus - the former is where you grow only what you need, and the latter is where you grow a surplus and trade that which remains. The first evidence of the trade in food varies between 10 thousand and 20 thousand years ago.

Subordination is the most contentious of the three pillars of society, because ultimately it deals with power dynamics. We like to think the idea of monarchy arose in the middle ages and that democracy is the natural progression towards a republican society but that's actually putting the cart before the horse. Ancient Rome for instance was a republic before it became an Empire, with democracy that was then replaced by dictatorship, by popular demand no less. The true nature of subordination is more complex than can be summed up in a single paragraph, first and foremost because society as a concept did not emerge universally, but rather emerged as separate unconnected societal models divided by geography it was only through globalisation over the course of several millennia that these concepts converged.

So what has all of this got to do with AI? The three pillars of society: structure, delegation, and subordination, all collectively converge to control resources, their distribution, and their consumption. That is what society is, the management, or mismanagement of resources, by collective consent through a social contract that is upheld insofar as those who participate still believe that doing so benefits them in some way.

Whether you call it capitalism as we have done for a few centuries now, or whether you simply refer to it as consumption, ultimately that consumption requires the exchange of some form of currency in return for the resources we wish to consume. AI will not lead to mass unemployment for one simple reason - if you have no income, you cannot consume, and society needs you to continue to consume for it to exist.

The Industrial Revolution fundamentally changed the way we work, but it did not eliminate work. The agricultural industry in terms of labour, shrank significantly thanks to the automation of most of that work, but the secondary and tertiary industries grew thanks to that increased production which created jobs. The question then turns to AI, if it eliminates some jobs, what jobs will it create? There are two obvious answers, firstly AI requires an immense amount of power, so power production, distribution, and maintenance is an industry that is likely to grow as a result, and secondly AI requires Data Production.

AI or to be more precise, Large Language Models [LLMs] as the most popular form thereof, needs data to process. When these models are allowed to run recursively, training on their own existing data, they succumb to rot quite quickly. The integrity of the data is lost and the functionality however you choose to measure it ultimately declines. I've written a post in the past on the distinction between a-priori and a-posteriori knowledge and the reason I think humanity won't become completely redundant being AI's inability to accurately emulate both.

AI needs novelty, new data generated with integrity that AI itself cannot verify for the time being - arguably this is because AI does not have a body, precepts, and the ability to "live" and experience the implementation of knowledge, or to put it another way, if the formula for Wisdom is such that Wisdom = Knowledge + Experience, the reason AI isn't wise is because it can't satisfy the latter variable. This might not be the case forever, several startups including one by Jonathan Ive former VP of Industrial Design and Chief Design Officer at Apple, aims to create devices that enable AI to gather experience based data.

I'm not going to say a dystopian future is impossible, mainly because I believe we already live in a dystopia, the veil of society is thin and it breaks and splits very quickly when you pay too close attention to it. For those who still find comfort in the concept of society and still believe it will persist, those three pillars need you to be able to consume, and as no government seems willing to embrace Universal Basic Income or any derivative that would enable you to continue consuming without working, the simple conclusion is that so long as society needs you to consume, it needs a way for you to fund that consumption, which for the foreseeable future will still be through employment.

If the UK for instance with a population of 66 million people, some 30 million of which are currently in employment were to suddenly find say 25 million of those workers made unemployed due to AI, the GDP of the UK would fall through the floor and consumption of everything beyond essential goods and services would flatline. The richest in society in the 1% would see their net worth crater as the value of the stocks and shares in the companies that rely on consumption would be bankrupted by a population that can't afford to consume.