Will AI deliver a Lifetime of Unemployment?

I’ve started to see the following headlines pop up on YouTube, X, and LinkedIn. They’re everywhere I hang out online...

• Web design is dead! Do UX instead.
• Graphic design is dead! Do UX instead.
• Game design is dead! Do UX instead.

We can’t be too far away from this headline: UX is dead! Do, er...

And therein lies the problem, doesn’t it? Whether we’re ready to admit it or not, artificial intelligence is in the process of replacing us. At some point in the near future, unemployment is coming for every single one of us.

What Happens Next?

Most of the people I know are in denial about this. Perhaps you are, too? Maybe you consider yourself in a safe occupation that no mere machine can replace?

Take outbound telesales, for example. Surely, artificial intelligence can’t replace a human salesperson? Well...

I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the telesales industry is already replacing human salespeople with machines that...

• Don’t suffer any emotional impact from constant rejection.
• Have no qualms about interrupting people during dinner.
• Can intelligently respond to any objection raised.

See PlayAI, Retell.AI, CallFluent, and SalesCloser if you’d like to meet the “employees” that are about to replace you and leave you unemployable.

I will never be Unemployed because I’m too Important

Perhaps you’re a senior Partner in a law firm, or you perform delicate surgery on the great and the good? Surely, you are too skilled, educated, and/or important to be left on the scrapheap with the rest of us?

Maybe you can imagine your juniors being replaced with AI, but not you! As far as you’re concerned, your mind is too special to be replaced with a simulation; thus, you will never find yourself in a state of unemployment.

In which case, I must inform you that AI is already being used by those of us who are too poor to employ your services. Perhaps the legal advice and medical opinions we’re getting from AI aren’t officially sanctioned, but that’s beside the point.

AI will continue to improve, while you and your colleagues will not. The professional guilds are about to be thwarted by a technology that doesn’t care about its artificial monopolies.

The plain fact is that everything a human mind can do will be done better by a machine at some point, and probably already is.

No matter how special you are relative to the rest of us, you’re a toddler relative to what’s coming. And what’s coming for you is the same thing that’s coming for the rest of us: unemployment.

Nobody Trusts a Machine to do what I do!

Maybe that’s true of the majority of people today. But it’s not true of everybody, and eventually, the client of a business owner will trust a machine. And that business owner is going to enjoy the sort of profitability that forces the competition to make the same move.

There will be other unexpected persuaders, also. For example, my father recently told me he couldn’t imagine any circumstance in which he would buy a self-driving car.

He has reached the age where he must resit his driving test every two years, so I asked him, “What if you fail your license next time around?”

My father was unable to imagine a circumstance in which AI might provide him with a service he couldn’t resist, but I could, and that’s the point I’m making.

While you and I may not be able to imagine how AI can do a particular job, someone will. What’s more, in time, I doubt AI will even need us to imagine on its behalf.

Judgemental

“Ah,” you say, “but I am a High Court judge. No mere machine can replace someone as lofty as me!”

If you are a high court judge who naively imagines you won’t end up in a state of unemployment like the rest of us, then I strongly recommend that you gird your loins before you continue, because unemployment is coming for you, too...

There are many who no longer trust the judiciary after they allowed their activist colleagues to stamp out one thousand years’ worth of common-law rights and transition justice into social justice. Or, to be considerably more precise, injustice.

Given the choice, there are plenty of people who will opt for an AI judge over a political activist.

Now consider the decision faced by a bealeagured Minister of Finance facing an ever-decreasing tax base as unemployment soars. Why should such a person finance the next mercedes of a hated judicial activist when AI will do a better job for a relative song?

The same is true in healthcare. People imagine they would never trust an AI doctor, but I don’t believe that’s true...

• AI is already more reliable than humans in some diagnostic situations (e.g., radiology).
• Some procedures are embarrassing for the patient, and a robot doctor or nurse may be preferable.

But the real clincher, as always, comes down to cost. Medical staff are expensive. AI and robotics will inevitably bring down the cost of doctoring and nursing. My guess is that patients will end up with no say in the matter.

I think unemployment is coming for medical staff, too.

Goodbye Government

Meanwhile, government regulators may feel they’re perfectly safe from unemployment. After all, they’re essentially immune to the consequences of their actions.

What’s more, unlike people in the private sector, most of them are a drain on the economy. How on Earth can something as productive as AI ever replace those whose job involves inventing new roadblocks and placing them in the way of the productive class?

By removing every productive human from the economy, that’s how. When the rest of us are unemployed, regulators will also find themselves in a state of unemployment.

There is no protection against the onset of AI, and I suspect that is going to be especially true for those branches of the public service that have spent the last ten years making themselves enemies of the people...

• Police officers who no longer investigate crimes.
• Tax officials who throw people out of their homes.
• Social workers and judges who prevent fathers from seeing their children.
• Regulators who deny homeowners the right to modify their properties without paying ruinous fees.
• Teachers who conspire with the children in their care to subvert parents’ rights.

Regulators and civil servants aren’t immune to unemployment, not least because they have used up all of their political capital and set themselves at odds with the interests of ordinary people.

Politicians, firemen, train drivers, surgeons, nurses, pilots, and everyone else who uses their monopoly to hold the rest of us to ransom are destined to be replaced by AI and autonomous robots.

I suspect many will be caught by surprise at the lack of sympathy they receive when it happens and they join the rest of us in a state of unemployment.

We are fast reaching a time when there is nothing that machines won’t be able to do better than we can.

As horrific as this sounds, I think economic and social pressures essentially guarantee that our species’ superpower is inevitably leading to a point where one of our tools replaces us.

Get Ready for a Lifetime of Unemployment

We are heading for a world in which every single one of us faces a lifetime of unemployment.

Most of us currently live under the comfortable delusion that we’re all going to end up with jobs in artificial intelligence. Yes, that’s right. As jobs in AI will be the only jobs going, all eight billion of us will have to work in AI.

As you can already see, that’s nonsense. The arrival of AI is nothing like the arrival of the Spinning Jenny or the computer.

Artificial intelligence isn’t going to replace a sector of the workforce. It’s going to replace the workforce.

Nevertheless, it’s comforting to think there is still a place for human labour and intellect. I suppose that’s why many of us allow ourselves to believe it. And, perhaps, that’s why nobody wants to have a serious conversation about our coming unemployment.

Dark Thoughts about Unemployment

These dark thoughts leave me with three uncomfortable questions...

1. What happens to our species when we find ourselves without a daily purpose?
2. What kind of lives will we live?
3. How on Earth will we survive if none of us can provide anything of value to the economy?

We may gain insights into the first two questions by examining what happens to the psyche, self-worth, morality, and emotional state of the long-term unemployed.

It doesn’t bode well, does it?

I don’t think there are any good answers to the third question. Mass unemployment is coming, and it worries me that nobody wants to have a serious conversation about the consequences.