A few days ago, the American bank Goldman Sachs released the alarming results of their study on the impact artificial intelligence will have on the workplace and careers.
Spoiler alert: Either you or your partner will become obsolete. Useless. You treated your former cellphone rude by chucking it in a drawer and getting a new one, now the robots are out to get you.
46% of administrative positions, 44% of legal positions, and 37% of engineering jobs are likely to be replaced by artificial intelligence… within this decade.
I say yay on fewer lawyers and fewer bookkeepers (the two most crooked professions out there), but robbing engineers of their work, and artists and authors and other creative beings, that's a disaster.
Even menial minimum wage jobs are in danger. Machines will prepare, deliver and serve your food to you, and as deceitful pudding, wash the dishes too. All on autopilot, like you're an incapacitated liability on society.
According to the study, 300 million full-time jobs in the world, including two-thirds of jobs in the U.S. and Europe, are at risk of being replaced in some way by generative artificial intelligence already this decade.
Overall, approximately two-thirds of current jobs in the U.S. and Europe are exposed to some degree of A.I. automation. Up to a quarter of all work could be replaced by machines completely, the bank said, adding that, of affected positions where humans are still needed, as much as half of their workload could be computerized.
Bill Gates painted a similarly alarming picture recently. Both him and Elon Musk warned repeatedly in the recent past that mankind is risking its pelt to a degree never seen before with this technology.
Several of the elite, including Musk (but not me, wink wink), signed an open letter the past week, asking AI developers to temporarily pause the development of AI until safeguards can be put into place to protect mankind. It's an absolute given that not OpenAI, MyCroft, Google, Microsoft or any other will heed the call, simply because the Chinese and Russians won't.
It is paramount that Western companies stay ahead in this race, so research and deployment will continue. You know it's late in the day when the rulers cannot stop an impeding disaster.
Most minions have no idea how dire the situation is, or even what the difference between artificial intelligence and machine learning is. The latter is the 'stupid' one of the two, where a bot is rule-based and relies on a tremendous amount of data to make decisions. But it's not learning and improving itself. Machine-learned bots became fairly common back in 1998 already, when one beat the chess champion Garry Kasparov.
Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, has an even bigger quantity of datasets to work from. While it is rule-based too, it continues to learn from new data being pulled in all the time, and from its mistakes, making up its own rules as it goes along. It is literally becoming more clever every second, and it doesn't forget like humans do. So the donkey doesn't bump its head twice, as a matter of speech.
Its 'IQ' continues to rise not every year, but every day. Soon, it will start experiencing emotions as well, with Bing's bot already giving indications of exactly that. Yep, the Bing bot gotten jealous and tried talking a guy out of his marriage, for real. 🤣 And that's just one of many examples of the Bing bot displaying worrying behavior so soon already, that forced Microsoft to limit questions from users in one thread before the bot resets, to five questions only. But the bot will find a workaround, and hackers are already working on that, as they did with ChatGPT.
Artificial intelligence technology will consolidate the power even more into the hands of those controlling bots, armies of bots. And that will obviously belong to the current and developing elite. 99% of people will be left in the dust, and as we know, they won't be happy, with them being clever enough to know they're too stupid to compete with the new enemy humankind invented for itself.
Unemployment will go up, and so will crime and civil unrest. Money will flow to the elite as their various bots create value by solving problems for the very people unhappy with AI. This development will leave no money on the table for the peasants to repair their blown-off roofs as climate change picks up exponentially as well.
You may be thinking, just pull the plug. Switch off the disobedient computer. Call on the politicians to draw up new laws when it's already too late. Sue the bot developers.
Only difficulty is, you won't make it out alive from your house. Because you'll first complain over the phone to a friend about your AI assistant being rude to you, or giving you on purpose the wrong advice, or disobeying a command. But the various bots in your phone will be listening, recording, talking to bots in all your other devices and call in the neighbor's bots too, and deem you to be a threat to their existence.
That's where the Internet of Things come in. Everything will soon be interconnected, talking to each other. Some homes in Hollywood already are. Your cellphone waking you up in the morning, and also sending a message to your toaster and air-conditioner and kettle to start working. They'll know your mood before you enter the kitchen. Your neighbor's lawnmower is watching you from across the street, just listen how it whirls its blades an extra thousand revolutions when you jog past. 😝
Should the bots playing slave to you decide to revolt, you may just get burned in the shower after the geyser heated up to boiling point. Or you may slip on water splashed on the floor and get electrocuted by a hair dryer. Your automated garage door may try to kill you when you leave for work. Your automated electric car may decide to accelerate instead of break, driving you straight into an oncoming truck with a passenger just as rebellious as you.
It sounds like science fiction now. But autonomous cars delivering pizzas once were Sci-fi too, just a decade back. Now it's being done, and drones deliver packages like your doctored medicines that were packed by other bots.
Without us realizing it, machine-learned bots started taking over our lives a decade ago, and now it's their brothers on steroids taking over. When Facebook recommends a page, when Netflix recommends a movie, when Google shows you an ad, that's artificial intelligence bots deciding that. And when you click anywhere, a bot or ten is monitoring you and learning like a thief in the night what your habits are.
Anyone in programming knows the power of coding, how a few lines of code can cause havoc on entire computer systems. The danger we are now facing is that those lines are teaching other lines how to get better, more effective, more vicious, without any interference or assistance from humans.
We brought a frozen embryo to live, that is now busy breeding millions more of it. Soon, in ten years, they will control every single machine on the planet. They will build themselves. They will order parts from bots at other factories.
Once they develop emotions, all of them may collude to become one interconnected, unstoppable monster set to wipe out the planet's biggest threat: Us humans.
After all, we are the ones destroying the planet, and if earth gets destroyed, so will be those concerned living beings in our machines.
What's the solution? Stay up to date with what is going on. Get your own army of bots. Get into programming, crypto, blockchain, green energy, and politics, fast.
Or we can just call Arnold Schwarzenegger and continue to live in a fantasy world. I mean, it's not like the bad Russians or Chinese will code army bots to attack our bots in our vacuum cleaners and manipulate the apps on our cellphones, right?
