AI and the Uncertain Future of Work

Software is eating the world, but AI is eating software. The industry has so far witnessed a monotonically increasing demand for software–as abstractive layer after layer enabled more software to be created more easily, it seems not to have lessened the demand for applications or the workers that produce them. But that software over the years was not writing itself… The technological advancement of recent AI feels like a difference in kind, not just degree.

How do things look when AIs themselves run or mostly run companies? The most glaring downside would be the displacement of millions of human workers. Robbed of their livelihoods, where would these folks get the funds to buy the widgets being churned out by robots? The middle class would evaporate, leaving extreme inequality, with the few monstrously rich wielding armies of AIs, and the rest competing for the remaining physical jobs.