12 July 2022

Future of Workforce

As AI becomes more ubiquitous in society, we are likely to see a massive shift which will be gradual in nature. More service level workers will be hired that can be replaceable for an organization when times get tough so they are easy to re-hire with rudimentary requirement of skills and in most cases this will relate to operating and managing robots. Such roles will act as buffers between management and robots to facilitate human-in-the-loop automation. The structure will become so flat that economies of scale will mean mass unemployment and degradation of the workforce at large where organizations will shrink in their hiring of human resources. Management of people will transform into the management of robots. As life becomes more simple and mundane so will it mean complexities of lifestyle and living standards between a huge rich vs poor divide. Societal class structures will inevitably mean makeshift barriers will be errected to keep the untouchable poor away from the rich resourceful. Security will take on a whole new transformation, in most cases violating freedoms and data protection rights of individuals. Education will become a widespread online learning experience for many, while lacking in quality, and the on-campus learning experience a privilege for a few. The few humans controlling the economies of the world will use robots against annihilation of the human race, what will be regarded as part of the eugenics movement. In many cases, this may take the shape of concentration camps while pandemics will be a natural course of action for population control. We have witnessed such scenes of societal destruction and urban decay play out in a multitude of movies, in most cases what is defined as sci-fi. However, as we move through the times, we come to realize that sci-fi is more and more becoming a reality for humans. It is the human that defines and creates a seed of ethics inside the artificial machine. What if this human is unethical? What if they are immoral? What if they build biases inside the programmable machine? We already see such issues of biases in machine learning models of today which are only to get more and more sophisticated. As time goes on, it is the human role that will no longer fit in the puzzle of the world. The future looks bleak for humans in the world of artificial intelligence and even superintelligence.