After the initial excitement, the implications of AI start to set in

It’s hard to open a newspaper, watch a news article or read a LinkedIn post these days without the subject of generative AI being front and centre. This time last year, the topic was something discussed in the lab or in niche technology areas. Then when GPT4 landed a year ago, the topic immediately went mainstream. I’m struck by how it has both captured the imagination of so many millions of people worldwide, but also how it divides opinion in such a polarised way.

Suddenly the world is full of experts in generative AI, laying out firm predictions of how it will impact our world, in both good and bad ways. Yet a year ago, many (maybe most) of these commentators were unaware of the technology in the first place. Now they are the oracles of a technology that has been deemed “the most disruptive force in history”. One prediction that I do accept though is that, like many leaps forward achieved in the technology world, we run the risk of over-estimating it’s impact in the short term, but under-estimating it’s impact in the longer term. That longer term impact is what I want to talk about today as amongst other things, it has deep societal implications.

After the initial flurry of excitement about how generative AI can so easily create so many use cases, from writing speeches and songs to creating amazing art or passing exams, more recently we are seeing the emergence of a more considered set of conversations about how we harness this new power and use it for good as opposed to a threat against us. Just this week I was reading Dario Amodei’s post on Anthropic’s framework for AI safety, deemed Responsible Scaling Policy - you can find it on LinkedIn. He admits it’s a first cut at establishing a protocol to manage the potentially darker side of AI, ensuring that as the technology develops it doesn’t become a tool for what he calls ‘catastrophic misuse’ or worse, ‘becoming the main source in the world of at least one serious global security threat, such as bioweapons’. But as the technology advances so rapidly, at least someone in a position of knowledge is trying to layout a framework for how we manage its risks.

Just last week, the U.K. hosted the first AI Safety Summit and again, I was struck by how seriously people are now starting to address the deep ethical issues this incredibly powerful new tool raises. The summit concluded with an agreement from a number of technology companies to allow authorities in several geographies, including the USA, the U.K., Singapore and the EU to work together and administer a safety framework to control how the technology develops and is used. However, with China, a major player in this space, not yet participating in the collaboration, there clearly is some way to go before the world is effectively joined up in protecting itself from itself. And as Yuval Harari wrote so eloquently in his book Homo Deus, if someone can create something to give them an advantage over others, human beings’ natural instinct is to use it, almost regardless of the consequences.

But with all these ethical issues now coming to the fore, let me dwell for a moment on what could lie ahead for all of us who make a living by going to work. Positive commentators focus on how the AI can be trained to handle routine administrative tasks, perform analysis, draw insights etc and how this can automate a lot of the drudgery in roles, freeing up the human mind for what it does best. Certainly this view is true and I’ve seen numerous examples in the businesses I work in where exactly that is happening. Companies who are investing wisely in these areas are not just cutting costs but opening new revenue streams so the economic benefit is undoubted for those winners.

However, there’s another side to this coin. Goldman Sachs recently issued a hard-hitting report forecasting that with around a quarter of all administrative tasks being ripe for automation via AI, 300 million fulltime job equivalents globally are under threat of elimination. The report goes on to state that, far from being a problem, this release of resources will create a productivity boom and drive GDP ever-higher. At the U.K. summit, the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak claimed that by investing more in building educational systems, we will develop and train the skills necessary to harness these new tools and create profound opportunities for social and economic development. Noble words and I am a strong supporter of education as the passport to a better life and society. That has been the case for generations and any investment or improvement in education gets my vote. However, when I look around the world, I see a chasm between these aspirations and reality. In many ways, many of the world's educational systems are already excellent (even though there’s always room for improvement). Yet at the same time I see a major gap in the institutional capability of any country to mass-train existing workforces in new skills, particularly at pace. The infrastructure simply does not exist and our traditional educational systems are not designed to meet this new need. And at the junior end of the work cycle, youth unemployment stubbornly sits at very high levels. Millions of young people globally have invested in their higher education and worked hard to obtain first class qualifications, yet so far have failed to find meaningful work that capitalises on the investment made in them. In several countries these young people are further saddled with debt accrued while they’ve been in education and that will take many years to repay. Whichever way we look at it, we are currently failing the very people who we will need to rely on in the next 10,20,30 years of development to harness these new tools. The numbers of people who have been sold the dream but are certainly not living it are huge. With youth unemployment over 20% in many countries, that’s millions of talented people looking for jobs, many of them fresh graduates, and there’s a pipeline of current students coming up behind who will soon join them looking for work. So as we casually talk about upskilling millions of people whose jobs are about to be automated, consider the fact that we cannot yet even create sufficient opportunities for the young talent trying to get a start in the world of work. That’s a hard circle to square.

What we often forget is that work is not just an economic issue, creating GDP and livelihoods. It’s also a powerful identity. Elon Musk recently predicted that technology would likely make all human work unnecessary. He speculated "There will come a point where no job is needed - you can have a job if you want one for personal satisfaction but Al will do everything." That is an incredibly profound statement and one that is as scary to me as the predictions of AI-powered Terminators wreaking the destruction of human-kind (another prediction oft-quoted). Think about the implications of that for a moment, because I hope he’s wrong.

Just recently I was travelling in Asia, in a small town off the beaten path. While sitting in a cafe at the roadside, it was entertaining to see the daily flow of life going on all around as people went about their business. Right outside was a man, probably in his 40’s, and he was in charge of helping people park their cars on the busy high street, and charging them a small fee. He’d put a slip of paper on the windscreen, have a chat, collect the fee when the car was ready to depart. Tasks that have long been eradicated where I live, parking apps having taken over. Yet he was also so much more than being the parking guy. He directed traffic when it started to block up and kept the place moving. He was giving directions. He was helping trucks get in position so they could unload their goods quickly. He’d help the elderly or children cross the road. He did it all with a smile on his face and he was a seriously busy guy, keeping everything flowing. And after a few minutes, his wife and child came by on their way with groceries and stopped for a brief chat. This was a man very at ease in his work, known to everyone, seemingly happy, healthy and helping make things work, above and beyond his official role of collecting a parking fee. He clearly had an identity in the hustle and bustle of life in the town. What becomes of him when the app finally arrives and collects the money automatically through number plate recognition ? Will he train up to be an AI-specialist, or an engineer, or a cyber security guru, all areas of acute skills shortages. Maybe he will, but even if he does there will be millions like him who won’t. And it won’t be simply blue collar roles under threat. The lists complied by people that analyse such matters suggest that over half the roles currently undertaken in many professional sectors face extinction, at least as we know them. We run the risk of losing and wasting these resources as opposed to redirecting them efficiently if we’re not soon thoughtful about managing these transitions at the major scale that AI implies will be necessary. That’s a huge loss of potential economic value, but on a personal level, it’s millions of people who lose not just a part of their livelihood, but identity too.

Some of you reading this will say it was ever thus and this is the price of progress. Winners and losers and those that can’t keep up get left behind. Others will say it’s up to the individual to go out and get the skills relevant for the new world, or the job of government to help on that journey. In my time at Hays, we spent time and money helping people figure out what they could do or learn to access the new jobs being created so they could keep their own careers moving. All these points of view have some validity and I personally believe in the power of technology to date in improving economies, societies and lives. However, if the outcome of these accelerating advances is that millions of people like the man I sat and watched are put on the scrap heap, either because they have no relevant skills or, as Musk speculated, there’s just no need for a job anymore, I wonder what the implications will be on personal identity and therefore, as a collective, on society. Musk also went on to say, “It's both good and bad - one of the challenges in the future will be how do we find meaning in life.” No one is discussing that implication right now, but if we don’t start to think about it soon, the disaffection already endured by so many young people struggling to get a start in the world of work will increase exponentially if millions of the rest of us join them.