AI is certainly coming for our jobs… but there’s no need to fear it.
The next 50 years will be the AI revolution. Similar to the industrial revolution (1780), the technical revolution (1870) and the scientific-technical revolution (1940), the AI revolution will make aspects of our jobs redundant and some jobs completely redundant.
For all three revolutions mentioned above people expected jobs to dry up and great economic hardship thereafter. Yet here we are in 2023 amidst one of the biggest labour shortages on record.
History has proven that revolutions don’t actually lead to mass long-term unemployment; although it’s hard not to think or fear it. Especially true when you watch an AI give a better answer to a question than you could yourself.
We do need to do something though. We’ll need to adapt, re-learn and take on new jobs. Jobs which an AI can’t do or can not do alone.
We don’t know what those jobs will be yet, (who would’ve thought of my job existing pre-internet) but when they come we need to be eager to up-skill rather than fight it otherwise we’ll be left behind.
This is a major milestone in history and we are in some way lucky to witness the end of the Digital Revolution (1975–2021) and welcome in the AI revolution (albeit sometimes scary for our tiny human brains).