Is AI bringing about another Industrial Revolution? When the West industrialized, the division of labor, family structure, and culture shifted significantly. While men often used to stay on the homestead to farm, they started going to the city every day to work in factories and mills. Public transit, warfare, communication, and entertainment all changed within a relatively short period of time. Today, AI represents a new, and perhaps an even more disruptive, cultural shift.

AI raises a lot of questions about the future of work, the economy, and culture and the arts. The perspectives range widely on how comprehensive the revolution really is, whether it will massively replace human workers or if its impact is radically overhyped, but one thing is certain: People across the media keep talking about it. The Walter Bradley Center, the publisher of Mind Matters, holds that we can wield computing machines like AI as tools but should never treat them as if they’re people, or on the flipside, treat people as if they’re machines. The “computational” metaphor for understanding human nature and the world has had deleterious consequences.

AI 2027

Many of these vital questions are thoughtfully explored in a new podcast episode of Interesting Times, hosted by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. Douthat interviewed Daniel Kokotajlo, executive director of the A.I. Futures Project, who helped pen a predictive article on where AI is headed over the next decade called “AI 2027.” The report starts chillingly:

We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.

We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like.¹ It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes.²

Kokotajlo and his colleagues contend that coding jobs will be among the first to fall to AI, but that the replacement rate will speed up in 2026. The authors go on to predict:

The job market for junior software engineers is in turmoil: the AIs can do everything taught by a CS degree, but people who know how to manage and quality-control teams of AIs are making a killing. Business gurus tell job seekers that familiarity with AI is the most important skill to put on a resume. Many people fear that the next wave of AIs will come for their jobs; there is a 10,000 person anti-AI protest in DC.

Out of a Job

Kokotajlo and Douthat discuss how AI will give companies cheap and effective labor in the short run, saving money and time. However, what happens to the people who lose their jobs? In the past, Kokotajlo notes, people who lost jobs to a new technological advancement (say a carriage driver getting replaced by the taxicab) would simply move on to another role, maybe with construction or clerking for a bank. In the case with AI, though, it isn’t that simple. Kokotajlo says that advanced forms of the technology, or AGI (artificial general intelligence) will be good enough to take over any job that these unemployed humans might try to go for. In a strange twist of events, we could see an exceedingly wealthy country with record numbers of jobless citizens.

Whether the timeline is accurate or way off the mark, the authors of the predictive report clearly think AI is only going to accelerate, and that we will soon feel the impact. “AI 2027 is a forecast, but it’s not a recommendation,” Kokotajlo clarifies. “We are not saying this is what everyone should do. This is actually quite bad for humanity if things progress in the way that we’re talking about” (18:47).

Along with the Douthat interview, The Free Press recently hosted a debate titled “Will A.I. Save Us — or Destroy Us?” The title suggests the great stakes in this debate and provokes another big question about what it really means to be human. Why are we exceptional and special, or are we? And how are we to regard machines that appear to emulate some of our most cherished capacities, like reason, analysis, and thought itself? This technology, whatever one’s view on it, is unique in the history of human inventions. It’s forcing us to come to revisit our notions of the human person — who we are and what we alone can do. What seems promising, though, is the fact that people are so robustly talking about AI and its place in our world. Perhaps the human conversation alone is argument enough on why AI can never replace us. AI still can’t host an intellectual debate or throw a birthday party, and I’m not sure why we would ever want it to.